Bill Wattenburg’s first television show was an expose on the slaughter of dolphins by tuna fishing fleets called “The Last Days of the Dolphins”, which Westinghouse Broadcasting aired nationally in 1975. Strong complaints from major food company advertisers who market tuna almost cancelled the show. The original celebrity host had backed out after major advertisers complained. Wattenburg agreed to replace him. This shocking documentary showed the needless slaughter of 500,000 dolphins a year because tuna fisherman refused to change the crude nets they had been using for decades. Congress outlawed the old nets a week after this dramatic show was aired nationwide.
Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. (KPIX Channel 5 TV, San Francisco) then asked Bill Wattenburg to host a new half-hour newsmagazine show which aired on Friday nights primetime (The People’s Five Show) from September 1975 to 1977. They used one of the first TV mini-cams to shoot the show “on the street” with only one cameraman-director, host Wattenburg, and no scriptwriters.
This show and its format were later expanded to become Westinghouse’s “Evening Magazine”, which has been syndicated nationwide since 1977 [usually under the name “P.M. Magazine” outside of the SF broadcasting area—PKS]. Wattenburg returned to weekend talk radio and his scientific work at the university when the TV show went to five nights a week.
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