• The Associated Press, Tuesday, June 24, 2008 10 AM

Reality TV is making news documentaries harder to film, as subjects fear producers won't portray their lives accurately. In filming a documentary about Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, ABC News producers had to deal with the cynicism of some doctors. They assumed the network was making just another reality show instead of realistically trying to portray life at a big hospital.

ABC's crew spent four months at Hopkins, taking thousands of hours of film. Crew member Alex Piper, contrasted that with the reality series he has worked on in which filming would be done in a month or two. "Are the viewers making a distinction? Do you get brownie points for making something that is a true documentary? The answer is no," he says.

It probably doesn't help matters that ABC is promoting "Hopkins" with spots interspersing pictures of its real-life characters with the fictional doctors and nurses on "Grey's Anatomy."

Read the whole story at The Associated Press »