On February 11, 1993, as the media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century was already showing signs of strain, CBS Evening News closed with a story on the increasing number of docudramas – made-for-television movies based on events and people in the news – being aired on prime-time television. The segment focused on the plans of all three major networks to air docudramas about Amy Fisher, a young woman who was convicted for shooting the wife of her sleazy lover Joey Buttafuoco. In response to the segment, Dan Rather ended his broadcast by facing the camera and, referring to the news broadcast he had anchored for more than a decade, saying, “This is real.” Of course, the notion that what is real or true is contestable and socially constructed is as old as the idea of the modern fact itself (Poovey ). What is telling about Rather's impromptu comment is less its naïveté than that he felt the need to make it at all, a clear indication that the norms, practices, and institutions that for more than half a century had served to distinguish news from entertainment were collapsing. Were the comment made during the height of the Age of Broadcast News, it would have taken on a very different meaning, much like Walter Cronkite's signature closing of CBS Evening News: “And that's the way it is.” During a period of regime stability, this nightly mantra, made by the most trusted man in America (according to polls of the time), signaled the acceptance by both viewers and journalists that the news media provided a useful and accurate picture of political reality. By 1993, however, Rather's unrehearsed comment, tinged with exasperation (and coupled with the fact that CBS Evening News chose to treat the docudrama battle as newsworthy at all, in the process providing free advertising for its own network's version of the Amy Fisher story), connoted little more than a desperate attempt to maintain the distinction between news and entertainment. And it is a comment that, were a news anchor to even consider making today, could be received only as ironic or satirical.