‘THE VANISHING FAMILY’ SCORES WHERE IT COUNTS

The documentary may be a dying form but it can still be a remarkably powerful form, whose impact and worth cannot be measured in ratings.

On Jan. 25, CBS aired a thought-provoking, 90-minute “CBS Reports” called “The Vanishing Family--Crisis in Black America.” It was anchored and reported by Bill Moyers, who spent a year putting the program together with executive producer Perry Wolff, profiling “the human beings behind the statistics” among three black families in Newark, N.J.

In the weekly ratings, it finished 64th among 67 prime-time programs, with an 8.1 Nielsen rating and a 14% audience share.

But its largest audience was here in opinion-making Washington, where “The Vanishing Family” achieved a 20 share.

Overnight, newspaper readers here could measure the program’s impact--in the editorial responses, the columns, the unsolicited comments from politicians and community leaders.

CBS itself found a different yardstick. Its CBS Broadcast International is the unit that markets, for $300 each, the cassettes of CBS programs. For the most part, the purchasers of documentaries are institutional--schools, churches, libraries--for use in training programs and the like.

As a rule, the unit might sell 20 cassettes of a CBS News documentary. Before the week was out, there had been more than 200 requests for “The Vanishing Family” and orders were still coming in.

An official of the California state school system called to order 7,500 copies of the program, for use in every school in the system.

“It is the largest demand for a CBS News product we’ve ever had,” CBS News senior vice president David Fuchs said Monday. “Much more importantly, we are hearing from exactly the people we had hoped to reach. A black teacher in Newark called Bill directly after the broadcast to get a cassette to show to all of her classes.

“We’ve had inquiries from black community leaders and church leaders and educators all over the country, in cities like Nashville and Augusta. . . . Two or three U.S. senators have asked for tapes. So have New York state legislators.”