This subject was prompted by a new show on the Fox Television Network that I sampled for fifteen minutes last week. That network has a diet heavy on reality programs and they’ve thrown up another one called “Anchorwoman.” It is hard to tell if this show is mocking local news or if it simply goes where most TV news directors lack the courage to tread. It takes an ex-beauty queen, Lauren Jones, and drops her into the newsroom of Texas station KYTV-TV in Tyler. The station manager, Phil Hurley, goes along with the gag and says that he simply wants more eyeballs on his newscast- certainly since they are the new outfit in the community.
I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry- Don Henly lyrics from hit song “Dirty Laundry
There was a time not too long ago when TV news was something other than the center ring of a circus and the architect of that era of serious broadcast news was Edward R. Murrow. Edward R. Murrow is the most distinguished and renowned figure in the history of American broadcast journalism. Edward Murrow was a seminal force in the creation and development of electronic newsgathering as both a craft and a profession. His career began at CBS in 1935 and spanned the infancy of news and public affairs programming on radio through the growth of television in the 1950s as it eventually became the nation's most popular news medium. By the time Edward Murrow left the anchor chair there was already a "Murrow legend and tradition" of courage, integrity, social responsibility, and journalistic excellence. That blueprint for TV news has since either been lost or more likely, erased.
Even in the days of Walter Cronkite at CBS during the 1960s and into the ‘70s, the business model for broadcast news had little to do with making money. At the TV networks, news departments were a large investment and viewed as necessary to meet broadcast license requirements as well as supplying a patina of prestige as an antidote to shows like “Hee-Haw.” William S. Paley, founder of CBS, helped give birth to “60 Minutes,” the longest running newsmagazine program, which took a long time to become a cash cow. In the 1950s, a TV newscast was just 15 minutes long with John Cameron Swayze anchoring on NBC. By the time Walter Cronkite slid into the anchor spot on CBS replacing Douglas Edwards, network newscasts had grown to 30 minutes, and local stations produced their own 30 minute news shows to make a one hour block. Today in Los Angeles a station that I’m well acquainted with runs five hours per day under the label of news programming. Even in the largest markets, can there be five hours of real news? It seems the answer is no because most of those newscasts are filled out with lifestyle segments and feature pieces that aren’t news to anyone except the doe eyed reporters drafted to present them.
I think that things changed radically in the 1970s. On viewing “Eye Witness News” during my first visit to Los Angeles in 1975, I was at first impressed by how the news was delivered by an entire tribe of people wearing blue blazers and lapel pins bearing the channel number! Behind the anchor desk now is a duo consisting of the Amazonian blonde and a suitably gray-haired male partner. There are video reports from all over town which became known as “team coverage.” A key reason for all this is that the sales department discovered a product they could sell while management recognized that the station could keep all the revenue and not share it with the network who supplied them the ‘national’ news. A new drug had been invented for local stations. Also, in the decade that followed my arrival, the Federal Communications Commission became lax about what was considered “public service” and downgraded their scrutiny of what stations were committed to do.
A significant watershed creative work on the state of television in America was the brilliantly written screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky for the film “Network.” This bit of dialogue from the embattled hero newsman Howard Beale played by Academy Award winner Peter Finch says a lot. Remember, this was 1976.
Howard Beale: “I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won't say anything." Well I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. All I know is first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a human being. God Dammit, my life has value." So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore! "Things have got to change my friends. You've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
“Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I dont have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear
Give us dirty laundry.” Don Henly lyric
In the 1980s and ‘90s, the devolution continued because now stations were racing with each other to put on more hours of these video mash-ups they called news. We learned at a pretty young age that cooking up more soup with the same amount of potatoes makes for a pretty thin meal. And in that competitive environment, let us not forget those wonderful promo spots to seduce you into watching. Items such as “Terror is Lurking Under Your Kitchen Sink” or “Predators Searching for Victims, Details at 11” have become fodder for late night comedians.
You see, local TV stations have a business problem that is growing. To fully participate in this digital era they’ll have to produce content that can fill their web sites. But they don’t own those sitcoms, dramas and reality shows that crowd their airwaves, they only rent them by paying license fees. However the ‘news’ product is something they do produce, own and control. So, making a product that can be broadcast and then moved to the web seems to be the way to go. In an era of increasing choices and diminishing margins, they have to produce it at a cost that unfortunately won’t support a staff large enough to make it “rich” content. I’m fond of telling some very nice people who write for local news that they’ve been reduced to writing captions for pictures and don’t really get to write full stories. That is why the first 5 stories on a local newscast don’t often resemble the first five stories on the front page of your local newspaper. The broadcaster has generally gravitated to the very visual (meaning shallow) story while the newspaper has to hold your attention with words and journalism. You’ve probably heard it said about TV news, that “If it bleeds, it leads.” If the stations had a staff of researchers, writers and reporters large enough to do in-depth stories, the easy profit evaporates and that is what TV stations have enjoyed for the past 50 years.
Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a
Running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry.
There are many challenges for local station owners. In February of 2009, even the analogue channel numbers that you grew up with, such as 4, 7 or 13, will disappear when they must all go digital. The investment of hundreds of millions of dollars by broadcast conglomerates in the past 15 years is feeling a bit fragile right now, even without the downdraft in advertising revenues for TV and newspapers. Those Infomercials offering you a svelte body with little effort are bit like cocaine to the business. They pay a premium in cash and don’t require a lot of client services time from the station management. A new business model is emerging, but it isn’t completely clear and certainly isn’t showing up fast enough for many broadcasters.
What we have called TV news has become a battleground for the survival of your favorite local channel, and they haven’t been improving the product. Stories are often written by people whose vocabularies are thin and whose knowledge of government and culture is even thinner. Ask yourself a key question. Does your life resemble what they put on the air or do you want it to? No wonder we’ve become afraid and distrusting of almost everything. Local news has spent decades teaching us that behavior.
We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When its said and done we havent told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry.
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