The Five-Minute Minute
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE FIVE-MINUTE MINUTE BY MARVIN KITMAN The average television editorial is usually one minute long, but it seems to last five minutes. Replies to the editorial-also usually one...
...He was worried about his delivery...
...After all, one rarely heard of their better side...
...What's your opinion...
...These writers are frequently former newspapermen with broader backgrounds than the people who actually read the editorials-generally men who have risen to the top from the ranks of sales-and they research their work heavily...
...After writing a blistering polemic against pollution, the editorial board asked him for his documentation...
...But it's not evidence that editorials are taken seriously.' Balboni is editorial director of WCVB-TV in Boston, and is a man who obviously takes himself very seriously...
...Without them, there wouldn't be any need for the replies...
...He never ran into the problem faced by another old pro...
...They are usually very low-keyed performers...
...He need not have been concerned...
...Indeed, readers have been known to weep with joy or gnash their teeth, depending on whether or not the publisher's opinions agreed with their own...
...Today, the major New York stations have permanent staffers whose primary duty is composing the 60-second comments...
...there is no reason why the medium can't also sell its opinions...
...It looks dark...
...And the future of the TV editorial, as they often say on TV editorials, doesn't augur well...
...I'm not sure that I'm prepared to sit through the likely rebuttals to Miss Doda around the country either...
...So far, I have never seen a TV editorial that has similarly shaken my set or my emotions...
...But when they do, they have pearly teeth, dear...
...Television sells entertainment and information...
...Yet people still don't think our editorials are controversial...
...The logical vehicle for television is not the body of type used in newspaper editorials, but rather the editorial cartoon...
...A friend of mine used to grow livid whenever she heard the vicious anti-shark slanders...
...He didn't last much longer...
...And in the meantime, the issues that regularly feel the lash of the broadcasters' tongues have gone far beyond the traditional sharks, Christmas seals, drug abuse, littering, and careless driving...
...As it turned out, she never took my advice...
...This is the important question I would like to discuss today...
...While 1 don't have any statistics to prove it, my guess is that more people walk out on the editorials than any other TV segment-including the commercials and the programs...
...Activists have even tarred and feathered editors for what they wrote...
...True, I might not turn Doda off as quickly...
...These broadcast commentaries mark the high spots of any local station manager's day...
...Yet are they necessary...
...he asked an associate...
...Did I slur the last word...
...There is no reason to be afraid of them...
...I trust they got into more than just recounting the wonderful job one station did in getting a new flag put up at the county courthouse- a highlight of a previous convention...
...For example, despite their evil looks, they have been known to smile...
...So many viewers are turning their sets off that it is the only time I can turn on my air conditioner without worrying about blowing a fuse...
...How can a station manager [the usual speaker during the editorial minute] shake a set," one television editorialist countered...
...At last word, though, Carol Doda hasn't reduced apathy in San Jose to any extent...
...A picture by Oliphant on a TV screen should be worth at least 1,300 words (it's gone up-inflation) by any station manager's ghost-writer...
...Most sharks are our friends," protested Ann McGovern, a noted children's author...
...Program directors thus have a kind of negative power...
...The only thing you have to do if you encounter one is to ask what species he belongs to, though admittedly this is sometimes difficult to do underwater...
...And unlike the tube type, they have often moved individuals to action (such as cancelling subscriptions...
...They give him the chance to speak out on such burning issues of the times as man-eating sharks...
...I'm not sure...
...And my answer is: You bet they are...
...The right number of editorials would do more to solve the summer power shortages than any of the abusive epithets the word mongers have ever thrown at the public utilities...
...There is practically no subject we haven't spoken out sharply upon," a New York TV editorial writer said to me recently in precisely those words...
...I would say that five seconds of Carol Doda would have more visual impact than five hours of President Ford in his shirtsleeves...
...It's up here," the veteran journalist said, tapping his head...
...I wouldn't want to know...
...Anti-buxom-woman spokespersons would probably want to reply to her visual message, arguing that it is contrary to the flat-chested view of the world...
...He is the mild-mannered reporter-type who looks and sounds more like Clark Kent than William Jennings Bryan...
...Not long ago he was taping a piece for delivery on the New York television stump, the opinion-making capital of the nation...
...Kenneth H. MacQueen, vice president and general manager of WABC-TV in New York, is representative of the average TV editorial reader in American broadcasting today...
...Still, TV editorial writing has come so far as a serious craft that a National Broadcast Editorial Association (NBEA) exists with its own annual convention...
...In New York, most stations run their important editorials at about 6:58 p.m., right before the network news shows...
...They would point out that although only one man had been killed in four years, that was one too many...
...An editorial writer at New York's NBC affiliate used to show up at conferences carrying a shopping bag filled with articles to support every statement he wanted to make in his blast at what ails the world...
...A basic problem plaguing the TV editorial-the lack of an audience-certainly deserved their attention...
...We would like to know what you think...
...It's a bizarre situation, all right...
...I wasn't part of the captive audience at the NBEA gathering, but presumably those addressing the meeting had the opportunity to speak for longer than their usual 60 seconds...
...If the practice did little to develop the art of the editorial, at least it enhanced the prestige of the secretarial field...
...These are only my opinions...
...One creative station-KGSC-TV in San Jose, California-has already made at least some tentative advances in the visual direction...
...Since any reprehensible or irreprehensible organization or individual was encouraged to ask for equal time, the rebuts were occasionally more stimulating than the buts-only seeming about four minutes long...
...They didn't mess around on those early TV editorials...
...Without an exclamation point...
...How did he for a fact know that pollution was bad...
...So I used to encourage Ann McGovern to publicly defend them whenever their honor was sullied, usually in the summer...
...The vicious practice had to stop...
...After giving it to the sharks tooth and fin, the editorial would conclude, "This has been the opinion of the station's management...
...The written editorial, where I believe the basic idea for the TV version came from, has produced many fiery essays that could easily be read in 60 seconds...
...When I first began following TV editorials in the late 1960s, it seemed that most of the local New York stations-to return to my favorite controversy-were firmly against the sharks...
...For three years, its viewers have had the pleasure of watching on-camera editorialist Carol Doda, also famous in the show-and-tell business as the first topless dancer...
...Some gorgeous fashion model might demand the air to assail her on the grounds that with such a body, you don't get to see the clothes a person is wearing...
...They don't always," Ann McGovern explained...
...On the other hand, I might not hear a word she had said...
...Maybe we should do it over...
...The fault may lie in the written-essay form that is still being used to deliver the message...
...But despite their lack of success, the quality of TV editorials has improved enormously...
...I don't want to over-excite anybody...
...Then there is the question of equal time itself...
...Of the 300 or so species, only 30 are known to attack humans...
...Maybe it was felt that this was the best way to reach a wide spectrum of the public, to provide the common touch of a New York Daily News editorial...
...To counteract the bad-mouthing of sharks on TV, she wrote a book instead, called Sharks...
...Cheerful as the Doda presence may be,' Philip Scriber Balboni writes in a recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, "it is bound to depress those who have been hoping that broadcast editorials would become an important journalistic form...
...Would I prefer to see a Carol Doda or a Clark Kent (Kenneth MacQueen...
...In the old days, the job of writing them was often left to a secretary...
...Replies to the editorial-also usually one minute long-seem to run about 10 minutes...
...For three days and nights the nation's leading producers of spoken wisdom told each other what a good job 702 commercial television stations are doing in alerting the 66 million homes they reach to the controversies of the day...
...Being a supporter of the underdog, I was sympathetic to the shark's media plight...
...Presenting a Carol Doda editorial as often as four times a day may be a clever promotion, and it may be evidence of our faith in upward mobility...
...Scholastic Services is publishing it in February...
...The association met in San Francisco June 22-25 of this year...
Vol. 58 • August 1975 • No. 16
