Faking New Year: Countdown to a Controversy : Television: CBS and ABC will have recorded segments in their Dec. 31 specials.

By SHARON BERNSTEIN

Dec. 8, 1989 12 AM PT

FT. WORTH, Tex. — “Ten! Nine! Eight!” roared the stetson- and sequin-bedecked crowd.

Pop! Pop! Pop! boomed the bubbly bottles.

“It’s going to be a great 1990!” shrieked country music star Tanya Tucker. “Happy new year!”

It may have been Dec. 5 to the rest of the world, but it was New Year’s Eve at Billy Bob’s bar in Ft. Worth, home to the world’s only indoor rodeo ring and two mechanical bucking stuffed dead bulls.

And when the nation sees Billy Bob’s on CBS Dec. 31, the only indication that Tucker was actually a little early when she told the cameras, “Let’s go live to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York,” will be a small disclaimer reading, “portions of the telecast were recorded.”

“You mean we’re faking New Year’s?” asked a network executive who declined comment for this story.

Well, yes.

Both CBS and ABC, the only networks planning to run New Year’s Eve specials this year, will show the New York portion of their celebrations live. After all, there’s only one Times Square and only one humongous crowd to watch a lighted ball drop in the freezing cold.

But when the time comes to show how the rest of America is celebrating, the rest of America will be on tape.

“What we do is what we call a ‘fake new year,’ ” said Mike Gargiulo, who produces the CBS special. “We pretend it’s New Year’s Eve. At the appropriate hour, we do a countdown and we celebrate.”

Gargiulo said that the network has been “faking” New Year’s Eve for 11 years. Parties have been staged at Billy Bob’s, Disney World and the Hollywood Palace. On the Chinese New Year, the entire show is run again in Shanghai, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

At ABC, which has presented “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” for 18 years, the only live segments are those showing Clark in Times Square. The party and entertainment sections are all on tape, recorded this year in November at the Cocoanut Grove.

“I can’t believe it; I don’t believe they’re doing that,” former CBS News President Fred Friendly said when a reporter told him about the practice.

Staging New Year’s Eve, Friendly said, is no different than the controversial new practice of staging or re-enacting news events. “It’s as if some infectious disease is taking over, which will destroy the public’s faith in TV news,” he said.

“The one thing television has is credibility,” Friendly said. “That’s the only thing we have. It doesn’t matter if it’s New Year’s Eve or the Berlin Wall--you have to be able to believe it.”

The networks say there’s no comparison between staging the countdown to New Year’s Eve and re-enacting news events. Re-enactments have come under fire in recent months because critics claim they are misleading. One study of viewer response to re-enactments showed that people tend to retain the information in the segments but forget that it was staged.

“We’re not doing this to mislead people,” said producer Gargiulo. “We’ve been doing this for a lot longer than re-enactments have been an issue.”

A key difference between the Dec. 31 show and the re-enactments is that the New Year’s Eve program is meant to be entertainment, not news, according to CBS. Shows such as CBS’ “Saturday Night With Connie Chung” and NBC’s “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow,” which feature re-enactments of news events, have been criticized because they are produced by the network’s news divisions (though NBC News said recently that it was bowing out of “Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow”). The New Year’s Eve programs, on the other hand, are being produced through the CBS and ABC entertainment divisions.

“This is not one of those documentary re-enactment shows,” ABC spokeswoman Judy Raskin said. “This is entertainment.”

But Larry Grossman, former president of NBC News and a fellow at Columbia University’s Gannett Center for Media Studies, said that doesn’t matter.

“It’s stunning to me that it’s been going on for so many years,” Grossman said when contacted by a reporter. “I think it’s reprehensible. It’s shocking.”

Grossman said that the average person would never know whether a program was produced by an entertainment division or a news division. Any instance in which television uses its technological capabilities to mislead people, even if it’s just about when a party took place, is wrong, he said.

Mark Berlin, an attorney with the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, said that the agency has specific rules governing programs that are made to appear live.

The regulation reads: “Any taped, filmed or recorded program material in which time is of special significance or by which an affirmative attempt is made to create the impression that it is occuring simultaneously with the broadcast, shall be announced at the beginning as taped, filmed or recorded. The language of the announcement shall be clear and in terms commonly understood by the public.”

The networks said that they offer disclaimers in compliance with the FCC rule.