On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television LOCALIZING NETWORK NEWS BY REUVEN FRANK It is the consensus among people one talks to that something bad has happened to network news. They are vague, but angry. Some complain...
...It can generate those 10- and 20-second announcements that clutter the schedule about programs you ought to watch...
...We did it and picked up four Nielsen points in three weeks...
...news presentation is...
...So, at most stations the local newscast spends a lot of time on soft and cuddly non-news, and on police news, fires, drug busts, water main breaks, traffic accidents...
...It used to be said that by his presence Walter Cronkite reassured America things were not as bad as the news he reported would indicate, that David Brinkley put some fizz in the blandness of the Eisenhower years, that in the eye of the beholder the anchor was the news...
...The majority emphasize malfeasance, corruption, fraud, deviance, and celebrity interviews...
...They must be warm...
...Suddenly, there are a dozen imitators...
...By definition, this means it is not news...
...Flying anchors about with their entourages is expensive...
...Even the wars and famines that constitute today's foreign coverage are arbitrarily selected...
...The piece is filmed in advance...
...The evening news now offers live interviews...
...In the evening such segments are compressed affairs...
...An interview of someone who figures in the day's events, or is simply able to make it at the right time, must be short??too short for the supposedly skilled anchor to elicit anything the interviewee is unwilling to divulge...
...20/20 older than a decade...
...Now one can??if one is not fussy about the definition of "news...
...The hurricane seemed important enough to send out the mobile camera unit...
...some about a lack of authority...
...Scandal-tinged celebrities get almost as much attention as they do at the supermarket checkout...
...When a fourth arose it didn't bother with network news at all, and did very well, thank you...
...They never sat them together, though, reading alternate items...
...Yes, newspapers have the same problem, but you can skip a boring newspaper story...
...In those years Today made much of live television pictures whenever possible...
...Next Sunday's would be: "Storms Test the Strength of Your Anchor...
...He had the cameraman move in tight on the rippling water and spoke each half hour on what devastation Long Island had miraculously escaped...
...But it is promotable...
...Reporting them took not days but months, even years...
...You can't sell gloom...
...Expensive consultants tell station owners not only which anchors attract viewers but how these readers have to relate to each other...
...Rather headed for North Carolina's Outer Banks...
...My friend was standing on the beach with little to say...
...Between a Vietnamese Buddhist temple and a Baha'i temple stands the large, gray Sixth Presbyterian Church, whose pastor apparently picks topics for his sermons from the day's news...
...Besides, the affiliates like it...
...What an anchor does, the role he/she plays, will vastly puzzle some social archeologist digging up our shards 2,000 years hence...
...Meanwhile, cable came with its many channels??one of them...
...There were even a few uprooted trees and shattered walls...
...The trend quickened as new proprietors took over the three networks...
...Technological advances enabled any station to make and send pictures only networks could once afford...
...The morning programs have always been "service" oriented, mixing news with useful hints, performers from the popular arts, and a lot of live appearances by politicians, authors, scientists, doctors, and members of other categories too numerous to mention or bizarre to contemplate...
...Or change the dial...
...Sitting together is the face of local news...
...What happened...
...As for daily news programs, the heart of the mandate the networks do or do not bear, they have undergone what can be described as the morningization of the evening news and the localization of all network news...
...To begin with, there is less that is worth reporting...
...People who run local stations like to boast of their role in spreading local news...
...Promoting news programs in this helpful way used to be considered impossible, because one could never be sure of what tomorrow's news would be...
...They boast of doing the same thing locally with their anchors...
...D-day dawned bright and calm...
...This led to Rather reporting from the farm belt that the people of the Philippines overthrew Fernando Marcos...
...The localization of network news reached a climax with CBS' coronation of Connie Chung as Dan Rather's co-anchor...
...You know a major story when a Felliniesque helicopter drops an anchor into it...
...Yes, there were high winds and surf, and some roofs were torn off...
...And it shows...
...They have belonged to the morning since 1952, when Today sprang full-blown from the forehead of the great Pat Weaver...
...They remember network news as their messenger at the Berlin Wall and the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights revolution, the Kennedy years, Abscam...
...Watch The News tonight and see...
...The result is a press release...
...Since cable brings most American homes news on demand at any hour, the bosses of "over-the-air" broadcasting dare think they might be relieved of their presumed mandate to inform...
...Thus, as Hurricane Emily moved toward shore...
...The pairing of Connie Chung and Dan Rather also reflects a change in the function of the anchor...
...Instead, following an aggressive period of ravaging news department budgets, the new proprietors have told their news staffs to spend what is left on what audiences like, and be profitable...
...Only a few local stations have gone so far as to expunge news entirely, but even at the networks the rationale for all that effort has weakened...
...After long struggles both became popular, and profitable...
...Subjects that local news avoided, leaving them to the networks, were ducked by network news because the stations were getting rich that way...
...People in Stamford, Connecticut, don't care about David Dinkins...
...Sudan's famine is as deadly as Somalia's or Ethiopia's...
...Few stations try...
...Many things happened...
...But these interviews have become a feature of the network evening news and prominent people are much competed for, even if they add nothing except a famous face that anchors think enhances their own image...
...When that approach succeeded locally, it attracted the beleaguered managers of network news...
...And yet, if that is what happened to news, something more, something quite different happened to it within television itself...
...Although dropping news is no longer a forbidden option, no network seems likely to do that soon...
...some about audience exploitation...
...Fighting to retain an audience, network news made itself less taxing to the viewer's mind...
...But every network news executive has been accosted several times by a station manager advising him to pep up his news by putting "a good-looking girl" beside the anchorman...
...CBS did it, too...
...they must be a family...
...Joint anchors were to do different jobs in different places...
...Their best example is that foreign coverage has been reduced to wars and famines...
...As Emily moved out to sea, Rather flew up the coast in a helicopter telling his microphone about the devastation we could see??torn-up boards, pilings, scrap lumber...
...Who knows in these straitened times how many camera crews and reporters might not have been fired, foreign bureaus not shuttered, had they desisted...
...Equipment to take such pictures then filled a large moving van, and the technical arrangements for getting the television signal back from the field could take a day or even more...
...The cameraman moved his lens in very close...
...Having spent the money, the producers insisted that he say it anyway...
...albeit only once successfully, when Chet Huntley joined David Brinkley at NBC...
...It was a great time to be in the news business, but times change...
...As a result, crime stories abound, especially crime stories with no point, except that pictures happen to be available...
...A changing industry, cheap technology, fresh sources of news and pictures??all these have equipped stations to cover the country and the world as well as they like, as well as the networks are supposed to...
...He is free to go capture the drama of the big event while Chung stays in the studio to summarize the rest of the news...
...A market includes many localities...
...The hurricane veered...
...Experience has taught them that news content is not what makes for success and profit...
...CNN, an all-news service...
...Towering events bestrode the news from the Depression to the end of the Cold War...
...I happened to be in Washington that day, in a taxi driving north along 16th Street, a wide thoroughfare of churches and synagogues and temples...
...Stations do not serve municipalities, they serve radiuses, or "markets...
...After commercials, these programs have less than 22 minutes for news...
...The three-network monopoly of world and national coverage ended...
...to Tom Brokaw standing in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing and declaring that hundreds died in a South American mudslide, pictures of which were shown from New York...
...But for some years the function of the anchor has been less to give the news than to validate it...
...60 Minnies is 25 years old...
...Once mobility became symbolic, though, it became irreducible...
...Each network program currently includes as well a regular department under its own title??Inquiry, or Focus, or View, or whatever...
...Granted, the New York metropolitan area is an extreme example, yet every television station faces covering "local" news of no interest to many of its viewers...
...Networks have tried more than one anchor from time to time before...
...those in Summit, New Jersey, don't care about housing segregation in Yonkers...
...Pictures, indeed, but pictures that shock...
...Now, with any bulletin, Rather can unbutton his shirt and order up the jet...
...Some complain about trivialization...
...All anchors do it, insist on doing it, and get upset when the other anchors do it and they don't...
...They spawned new species, the foreign correspondent, the omniscient analyst??first with typewriters, then microphones, finally cameras...
...The ethnic-religious conflicts in the Caucasus that American network news has chosen to ignore are not less important than those in the former Yugoslavia...
...on television, you must wait until it ends...
...as the program ends and the lights go down, they should be seen in silhouette huddling together making jokes...
...It aims at universal interests, like people's health or money...
...The case can be made, however, that there is no such thing...
...A late colleague whose career included some years as a reporter for Today once reminisced about the time a hurricane headed for eastern Long Island...
...Emily also veered...
...new stations proliferated, most of them independent of networks...
...As for the morningization of the evening news, that is obvious to everyone who looks...
...Municipal affairs in one bore the citizens of another...
Vol. 76 • September 1993 • No. 11
