presented on a regular, midnight newscast). WFAA uncovered significant stories in the 1980s including information of academic improprieties that would lead to the Southern Methodist University football team being given the "death penalty" in the mid-1980s, as well as the first major media investigation into the America's Savings & Loan scandal that was rooted in Texas. WFAA-TV began its rise to news dominance in Dallas–Fort Worth during the late 1960s and early 1970s under the leadership of news manager Travis Linn, who had previously served as news director for WFAA radio. Linn later became Dallas bureau chief for CBS News before becoming professor and dean of the journalism program at the University of Nevada–Reno. Under Linn, the station expanded its news programming to 4½ hours per day, including an unprecedented one-hour program at 10 p.m. each weeknight as well as a 15-minute newscast at midnight four nights a week; the station also launched News 8 Etc., a 90-minute morning news-talk show that replaced the children's program Mr. Peppermint in January 1970 and was originally hosted by Suzie Humphreys and Don Harris, who conducted the broadcast without the assistance of cue cards or a TelePrompTer; following anchor Gene Thomas' death when a jet-powered dragster he was riding in for a story being produced for the show crashed at speeds of at Dallas International Motor Speedway in October 1971, the program underwent several changes to its anchor team and was later retooled in May 1974 as The AM Show (later shortened to simply AM), before ending in January 1978. Building its existing success, WFAA dominated the market's local news ratings from the mid-1970s—having overtaken WBAP-TV/KXAS' once-dominant The Texas News—through the late 1990s. The station strengthened its on-air news staff with top-tier talent, led by anchors including Tracy Rowlett (one of three reporters—along with Doug Fox and Byron Harris—whom news director Marty Haag brought over to WFAA from his previous job as news department head at KWTV in Oklahoma City in 1973), Iola Johnson (who became the first African American news anchor in Dallas in 1978, serving as a lead anchor with Rowlett), Bob Gooding, Murphy Martin, Judi Hanna, John Criswell, Chip Moody, John McCaa, Gloria Campos, Lisa McRee, Verne Lundquist, Dale Hansen and Troy Dungan (who, as chief weather anchor from 1976 to 2007, developed modern-day chroma key techniques for televised weather forecasts, the five-day forecast concept and created the "News 8