On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television THE CAMERA NEVER LIES BY REUVEN FRANK The firing of Michael G. Gartner as president of NBC News opened a long, and largely uninformed, discussion of deception in television...
...The serious discussions, meanwhile, focused on how this could happen...
...The reporter on the story was exiled to local news on the TV station NBC owns in Miami...
...Also, it was the real laundromat lady...
...As the words about passing the briefcase were spoken, a briefcase was seen being passed...
...Although CNN was best for the first time, the center's director deemed the "most striking finding" to be NBC News' drop from the top slot to the fourth...
...Still, the problem highlighted by the GM truck explosion is everywhere...
...Have we reached the point where deception masquerades as convention...
...Scripts were now written first, and the pictures were matched to the words...
...To them, too, it was the words that mattered, not the pictures...
...No, it isn't...
...Their consensus was that TV journalism lives by such pictures, and will do anything to get them...
...So what are you seeing when you see the news...
...It is not TV news' hunger for pictures that is being satisfied, however, it is the need to cover up words...
...The two recruited seven more and, in a mere month, all nine whipped up a 71-page report saying what any savvy editor, in any medium, would have said at the start: The faking was inexcusable...
...John Leo of U.S...
...The question of whether the trucks were safe was lost in a hubbub almost loud enough to drown out the findings of an Atlanta jury, in a case involving the death of a 17-year-old boy, that they were not...
...It is not uncommon for a network news writer to turn out a story about an event in the day's news and then read it to the archive department to fill every scene, cover every word, with pictures made in the recent, or less than recent, past...
...Op-Ed pages agreed: TV news is run by pictures...
...We," he went on to proclaim grandly, "deal in ideas and abstractions...
...Moreover, since all airports look alike, any airport can be used...
...A story about his departure—on the front page of the New York Times no less—had Gartner trying to pretend that he was merely accelerating a resignation long planned, but the world knew he had been forced to go...
...Newspapers pronounced on the vulnerability of television journalism to the fictitious and tendentious...
...A senior vice president of a major advertising agency said, "If you believe the news, you believe the commercials...
...That would certainly appear to be the case...
...He left unsaid what happens if you do not believe the news, or what he might do about it...
...On other occasions, a news event that has been taped as it took place will be shown the same night, every subsequent night the subject is mentioned, and whenever the general topic comes up, remote as the connection might be...
...That is not because television is a "visual medium," a cant phrase explaining nothing...
...No wonder Gartner was first to walk the plank...
...Unlike the words you hear, almost no pictures you see on a typical network evening news program, except for people talking, are of that day's developments...
...No picture people made it to the top...
...GE and NBC themselves caused much of the hubbub not only by firing Gartner but by hiring two big-name outside lawyers to investigate...
...Ideas and abstractions," though, were not why the Washington Post returned Janet Cooke's Pulitzer Prize for the faked story of a 10-year-old drug addict...
...GM, vindicated and victorious, withdrew the suit and the threats...
...The system fit the medium's sole unique capacity among the media: Only television can show things happening...
...It was not, though, the real Katie Beers one saw from the waist down in worn jeans, walking up Main Street, or stretching on tiptoe to reach a candy bar...
...The solons and pundits were unanimous: Television news hungers for dramatic pictures...
...First TV Asahi, a major network, was caught hiring actors to play a foreign gigolo and his customer in a documentary about Tokyo vice...
...Or Rodney King being beaten...
...No one was deceived...
...The report talked about her loneliness, her wandering about the small Long Island town where she lived too late at night for a 10-year-old to be up, buying candy, bringing her mother's wash to the laundromat, a waif everyone liked and pitied...
...Were they...
...so that it had a beginning, middle and conclusion...
...The auto maker did a better reporting job than NBC by unmasking the staging of the truck fire in embarrassing detail...
...A film editor would put the film together in a structured way—i.e...
...no one said the actors were Bloch and his Soviet partner...
...The head of TV Asahi apologized and took a pay cut...
...Cui male...
...Ideally, the words were a counterpoint to the pictures...
...The staged shots not only didn't work very well, they were unnecessary to the point of the story...
...Was there something about TV news that invited the problem...
...Richard Reeves, a Los Angeles Times columnist, was typical: "TV lives by the power of pictures worth thousands and thousands of words, and the credibility of TV news is dying by reaction to the impact of faked excitement...
...sometimes not...
...Likewise, last January 22, CBS Evening News did a backgrounder on Katie Beers, the little girl kidnapped by a family friend and held in a dungeon underneath his garage...
...These are called "generic" pictures, or "wallpaper" or "eyewash...
...More important, if there were no pictures for words already recorded, someone had to fetch them—usually from archives of pictures of past events, or no events at all...
...Japan is now having its own faking scandal...
...Within television news, an astonishing number found themselves so without sin they could cast the first, second and hundredth stones...
...Some years ago, when the State Department accused its employee, Felix Bloch, of passing secrets to a Soviet agent, the availability of appropriate pictures was understandably meager...
...Those early film reports were narratives because television is a narrative medium...
...An AT&T executive scoffed at "news organizations staging events and treating it as news...
...If the right picture was unavailable, arrangements could always be made...
...They said so, especially the laundromat lady...
...Then Asahi Shimbun, sister news-paperof TV Asahi, found deception in a documentary about Nepal done by NHK, Japan's counterpart of the BBC —faked altitude sickness, a staged landslide, a boy monk hired to pray for rain the day after a drought ended...
...During that short span television covered news very straightforwardly...
...At such moments, here as there, print journalism boasts that it is above chicanery...
...Its rules are few, forthright and mostly negative: Do not lie...
...Who was hurt...
...At the time, the real Katie Beers was under the jurisdiction of the Suffolk County juvenile authorities and not available for film...
...The Japanese may be better at this, too, than we are...
...do not invent...
...That is more than an academic matter...
...No one said it was the briefcase...
...There was indeed a period when pictures dominated television news, but it was brief and ended long ago...
...NBC apologized on the air, abjectly, at unprecedented length...
...The camera never lies...
...By coincidence, it was time for the respected Times Mirror Center for People and the Press to present its newest survey of network news credibility...
...It describes better than it explains...
...Nevertheless, it did seem to me to violate CBS News' explicit and lawyerly code of policies and standards...
...General Electric, which owns NBC, was so confounded that it had its own lawyers take over...
...Each happened only once...
...News& World Report told the Public Broadcasting Services' Charlie Rose, "TV craves drama...
...Sometimes the word "file" is superimposed...
...For weeks it had been following the drama resulting from an NBC News magazine program setting fire to a General Motors pickup truck with a "side saddle" gas tank while investigating the safety of such vehicles...
...Policy guidelines and written standards are useful for lawyers, who cite them to courts and other outsiders, not for journalists...
...As for the General Motors truck story, Michael Gartner and an NBC lawyer had in fact read the script in advance...
...Yet when I asked, I was told that because no one could think the real Katie Beers was being shown, there was no need for a spoken disclaimer...
...So ABC News decided to hire two actors, film them in shadow, and have one pass a briefcase to the other...
...How much is fact, how much deception and how much convention...
...Nor was The Front Page a play about TV news...
...All very simple...
...The piece was deceptive but not really misleading, was it...
...Can the people in control tell reality from realism...
...The older TV gets, the more it's going to heave in the direction of staging and drama because it deals in dramatic stories the way we don't...
...they had not asked to see the tape...
...If something happened at an airport and a camera crew was not there, why send one out later when the network library is full of airport pictures...
...A cameraman would go to an event and take pictures...
...Then General Motors sued NBC and moved to cancel its advertising on the network...
...This meant that if there was a wonderful picture—dramatic, symbolic, engaging—for which no words had been written, it was thrown away...
...It was an effective piece...
...As for the incident itself, the pictures of the staged fire, despite the effort they took, were not as effective as the pictures in the same report of real victims and the aftermaths of real crashes and explosions that had occurred with trucks of the same type...
...Afterward a script was done...
...Or someone had to make new ones...
...But it was not the camera that lied...
...On Television THE CAMERA NEVER LIES BY REUVEN FRANK The firing of Michael G. Gartner as president of NBC News opened a long, and largely uninformed, discussion of deception in television journalism...
...Thus emboldened, NBC fired the executive producer of Dateline, the program that had burned the truck, and two producers...
...do not take sides...
...Around the time Americans began telling pollsters TV was their principal source of news, the word people took over—as correspondents and anchormen, as producers and executives...
...The news writer's job in the process of captioning the pictures was not to tell the viewers what they could see, but rather what they needed to know—the place or circumstances of the event, the names of participants, why they were there, and the like...
...Since your eyes read it, print is also a visual medium...
...with videotape, which unlike film can be reproduced quickly and often without losing picture quality, the practice has exploded...
...Within those limits, news people are paid to be both accurate and interesting...
...No Robert Capa, no Alfred Eisenstaedt, no David Douglas Duncan—no Annie Leibovitz—became a vice president of news...
...Think of how many times you have watched that DC-10 cartwheeling at the Indianapolis airport...
...News is hardly a complicated business...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 5
