Bill Wattenburg’s Television Shows

His first television show  motivated congress to pass the  Marine Mammal Protection Act  in 1975 that has saved untold millions of dolphins since then. 

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.  This shocking documentary showed the needless slaughter of 500,000 dolphins a year worldwide  because tuna fisherman refused to change the crude nets they had been using for decades.   A crewmember working on a large tuna boat had taken film of the normal tuna fishing process.  The  dolphins trapped in the old nets were simply hauled onboard with the tuna.    Most of the dolphins  died  before they were thrown overboard.  Strong complaints from major food companies that marketed  tuna almost cancelled the show. The original celebrity host had backed out after major advertisers complained.   Wattenburg agreed to replace him as  narrator of this show.   A week after this dramatic TV show was aired nationwide,  congress changed its mind and passed what became the first  “Marine Mammal  Protection Act.”   The U.S. tuna fishing industry quickly changed their tuna nets to a simple  design that allows  the dolphins to escape in the sea  before the captured tuna are loaded onboard fishing vessels.

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.   The film crew used one of the first portable TV mini-cams (video camera)  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 was  syndicated nationwide, five nights a week,  under the name “P.M. Magazine.”    After September 1977,  Wattenburg returned to his KGO AM810  talk radio show,  “The Open Line to the West Coast,”  and his scientific work at the university.