48 Hours · Rikers · The '70s

Adweek’s A.J. Katz dropped a two-part interview last week with 48 Hours producer Judy Tygard and veteran correspondents Peter Van Sant and Erin Moriarty. The transcript isn’t really cleaned up, which is both somewhat unusual, and my own preference as an editor — you get a better sense in your mind’s ear of how the speaker sounds, and whether certain responses are rehearsed, etc. I think it’s particularly effective here, because it gives the reader insights the interviewees may not have intended about just how often they’ve answered various questions over the years…not to mention how highly they think of their own product.

The first part talks about 48 Hours’s transition from a kind of gimmicky logline — The First 48, but getting the news story versus solving a murder — to its current branded focus on “law and justice.” Van Sant talks about the challenges in/delicacy of “crashing” the Moscow, ID story, and he and the others remember to congratulate themselves on centering the victims, there and elsewhere.

Earlier in the piece, though, Moriarty seems to acknowledge that, often, the show is less affirmatively testifying to lives cut short, and more reacting to a trending “holy shit” story: