‘Funniest’ clips are still drawing laughs, viewers
Even in the age of YouTube, the 27-year-old series ‘AFV’ remains a hit show for ABC
After Megyn Kelly’s NBC News interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones generated a week of publicity-drawing controversy, radio host Howard Stern poked fun at the program’s modest ratings.
“She got beat by cats on a skateboard and little kids slipping in pools,” said Stern, noting how Kelly’s program June 18 had been topped by “America’s Funniest Home Videos” on ABC.
Vin Di Bona, the longtime executive producer of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” said there were no cats on skateboards on his show that week. But he certainly could have come up with one from the vast library of clips from the 27-year-old series that has depended on user-generated content since before most of the public had even heard of the Internet.
Although it’s not the mammoth audience draw that it was in the 1990s, “America’s Funniest Home Videos” remains a surprisingly popular show for millions of families every Sunday night. Even though videos of mischievous kids, wedding receptions gone awry, pet mishaps, and yes, people getting hit in the crotch, are ubiquitous on YouTube and other online sites, an average of 5.5 million people tuned in each week to watch “AFV” during the 2016-17 TV season. During the summer, it wins the 7 p.m. hour Sundays in the 18-to-49 age group most sought by advertisers, even against repeats of the other TV institution in the time period, the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes.”
In May, ABC renewed
want to operate on them, assuming it’s not an emergency.
“It is important for patients to be involved in their own healthcare, and we are trying to work more and more on getting this information in an easy-to-use format for the man on the street,” said Hoegh of the state health planning and development office.
No minimum number of surgeries is needed to calculate a rate, but the results must be statistically significant and are risk-adjusted to account for varying levels of illness or frailty among patients, Hoegh said.
She acknowledged that “a risk model can never capture all the risk” and said her office is always trying to improve its approach.
Surgeons sometimes file appeals — arguing, for example, that the risk was improperly calculated or that the death was unrelated to the surgery. The appeals can result in adjustments to a rate, Hoegh said.
Despite the controversy it generates, the public reporting is supported by the California Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the professional association representing the surgeons.
No one wants to be on the list, but “transparency is always a good thing,” said Junaid Khan, president of the society and director of cardiovascular surgery at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“The purpose of the list is not to be punitive,” Khan said. “It’s not to embarrass anybody. It is to help improve quality.”
Khan added that he believes outcomes of other heart procedures, such as angioplasty, should also be publicly reported.
Consumers Union, which sponsored the bill that led to the cardiac surgeon reports, supports expanding doctor-specific reporting to include a variety of other procedures — for example, birth outcomes, which could be valuable for expectant parents as they look for a doctor.
“Consumers are really hungry for physician-specific information,” said Betsy Imholz, the advocacy group’s special projects director. And, she added, “care that people receive actually improves once the data is made public.”
But efforts to expand reporting by name are likely to face opposition. Officials in Massachusetts, who had been reporting bypass outcomes for individual doctors, stopped doing it in 2013.
“Cardiac surgeons said, ‘Enough is enough. We can’t risk being in the papers as outliers,’ ” said Daniel Engelman, president of the Massachusetts Society of Thoracic Surgeons.
Engelman said the surgeons cited research from New York showing that public reporting may have led surgeons to turn away highrisk patients. Hoegh said research has not uncovered any such evidence in California.
Gorman is a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit newsroom that is an independent part of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.