There Is No Local News
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television THERE IS NO LOCAL NEWS By Reuven Frank History may after all include more than one "date which will live in infamy." Take September 20, 1995, for instance, a day when the...
...Perhaps the Denver Post or the Rocky Mountain News can report on an environmental danger that only one in 10 readers cares about, but for a television station to do so would be suicidal...
...Pavlov's TV Dogs commits a further error by generalizing from a limited number of broadcasts on a single night to over 800 stations year-round...
...Despite its shortcomings, Pavlov's TV Dogs merits notice as one of the few attempts at addressing a subject crying out for attention...
...It declared that "What the stations seek to cultivate is not an informed public but an emotionally aroused audience that is susceptible to advertising...
...Simple, complicated, cheap, funny, flashy — ideas for all kinds of media events are described...
...Afterward, the tapes of 100 programs were reviewed and indices compiled by the organization's analysts, headed by Dr...
...These typically consisted of five minutes of news—five minutes, that is, for covering the whole country and the whole world—plus five of sports and five of weather, each read by its own presenter and paid for by its own sponsor...
...for Chicago, 23...
...The worst case is obviously New York, where each VHF station covers 43 such districts...
...More seriously, like so many who sneer at traditional journalism, it dismisses the requirement that news be new...
...Available figures are broken down by Congressional district...
...A sales flier promises the booklet will teach anyone "how to stage media events, write press releases...
...School problems, too, lie within municipal boundaries...
...the night of the September 1995 sample, Eugene's viewers were informed of a zoning fight over rural subdivisions, rent hikes for halfway houses, a layoff of 200 workers from a local factory, and a beetle infestation in the area's ponderosa pines...
...Paul Klite, a retired physician who calls himself a "news activist...
...There are always exceptions...
...But things kept getting worse, until, by the time of the sampling in 1995, crime stories dominated fully half of the newscasts...
...Her station's news director, a journalist and executive accomplished in several of the media, had fought hard to overcome with solid reporting the audience lead enjoyed by two rival stations, both distinguished by their coverage of traffic jams...
...Time spent on sports scores, or even on fans celebrating the victory of a local team, is prissily censured as somehow foreign to the American news tradition...
...Were a television station to understand "local" the way a newspaper does, it would serve its various audiences one narrow segment at a time...
...deliver soundbites, book a guest on talk radio, lobby editorial writers...
...These made so much money that station owners, citing responsibility to their communities, moved on to onehour, and then two-hour, local news programs...
...The consensus view is a litany of the obvious —school board meetings and city council sessions, zoning disputes, local tax rates—things that truly affect people instead of just titillating them...
...Klite and his colleagues spent the months following that randomly chosen Wednesday in September collating, editing and categorizing their findings, and then packaging them with neat tables and graphics as perky as any sales presentation...
...Before that time, such programs were poorly staffed and were used to fill small holes in the schedule...
...A station manager here, a news director there, will try to elevate the coverage even in the biggest cities...
...Take September 20, 1995, for instance, a day when the news most Americans watch—local TV news—was certifiably awful...
...But what interests people universally, across cities, towns and villages, is what we might wish didn't: rape, fires that kill, fires with big flames, fender-benders on the Interstate, drive-by shootings, picnic drownings, a cat rescued from a tree...
...When the networks doubled the length of their nightly newscasts, the stations followed suit with half-hours of their own...
...None of which changes the basic facts of TV life...
...As they say: If you can't beat'em...
...As for news about "peace, science, the arts, overpopulation, and conflict resolution," it was "all but invisible...
...These, of course, are the stories that Pavlov s TV Dogs deplores...
...With the best will in the world, no station can survive that way...
...Apparently the authors are so busy with their charts and graphs that they have no time to actually watch the news in Denver or read the papers, at least not the sports pages...
...The report displays this ingenuous tone throughout, along with apparent ignorance of what constitutes news for the average reader or viewer in the United States...
...Television, in other words, dare not show what might interest only the few, lest all the rest turn it off...
...Called Let the World Know, it is a handbook on "how to generate news coverage about any cause or issue that concerns you...
...The station it most lauds for avoiding tawdry matter operates in Eugene, Oregon...
...Even a station in Flint, Michigan, or Fresno, California, covers 12 districts...
...This logic applies especially to the topic that the pamphlet's authors and other critics come closest to agreeing on: what local TV news should cover...
...The programming dilemmas here are obvious: Investigating local tax rates is fine, but whose...
...But that's an old story...
...Once again, reality must intervene...
...The discomfort about where local news has been heading goes back at least 30 years...
...Klite, a star spot on one of public radio's most popular talk shows for eggheads...
...Unlike newspaper readers, viewers cannot skip stories they find uninteresting or irrelevant, or save what seems complicated for more relaxed attention later...
...It speaks in the voice of the ass in the lion's skin...
...The underlying problem of "local television news" is there may be no such thing...
...His problem, he told the New York Times, was that "One station was promoting a helicopter and the other was promoting two helicopters...
...Let the World Know also claims to contain "unique advice on how to create newsworthy visual imagery...
...To compete for bigger audiences and thus bigger revenues, local broadcasts moved almost immediately into sensationalized coverage, heavy on crime and with lots of silly attention paid to the personal attributes of anchors...
...Decades ago, CBS' 60 Minutes presented a devastating report on the subject, most memorable for its account of the extraordinary interest a San Francisco station took in the discovery of a severed human penis on a railroad track...
...Like most critiques of what passes for local news, Pavlov's TV Dogs may have asked many of the right questions, but its answers are not of much use...
...some even tried three-hour formats...
...As Pavlov's TV Dogs notes, "For decades, critics have complained about excess violence, excess trivia, sensation and tabloid trends on TV news...
...It is possible to find innovations in one locality that are relevant in another, and these often do get covered...
...accordingly, when new proprietors started acquiring the networks in 1988, they embarked on an orgy of buyouts, layoffs, bureau closings, and cutbacks...
...Journalism proved no match, and in the end he walked the plank...
...For Los Angeles and Philadelphia, the number is 25...
...Network newscasts, by contrast, could claim a profit only if the costs of maintaining worldwide bureaus and news film organizations were not laid against them...
...If an audience is well primed and conditioned, advertising propaganda will go down like a sugarcoated pill...
...Eventually, they too must face the facts: When a gifted reporter for a New York station won prizes and forced dramatic improvement in the country's largest school system, her achievement did the station no good in Bergen County, New Jersey or Fairfield County, Connecticut (or in White Plains or Montauk, New York, for that matter...
...for San Francisco, 17, and so on...
...It has since become a rule of thumb that local news can generate half of a station's gross revenue...
...This was before cable, with its multiple channels of all-news, all-thetime...
...By echoing the general uneasiness with local news (especially among the jabbering classes), the pamphlet gained widespread attention and earned its principal author, Dr...
...Because of it, the work of Rocky Mountain Media Watch has come to the attention of many in significant places, notjust inacademia—as one might expect—but in editorial offices as well...
...When reporters and editors devote their attention to the house that burns, they by necessity ignore all the houses that didn't burn, and so are denounced for frightening children with a misleading impression of fire danger and for encouraging latent paranoia in the emotionally underequipped...
...Holding no brief for the garbage presented as local news almost everywhere in the United States, one must still point out that nearly every television station reaches quite a few municipalities—even hundreds...
...broadcasts coast-to-coast overwhelmingly featured crime, mayhem and disaster, while scanting the doings of local government, the problems of local schools and the threats to local ecosystems...
...It all depends on definitions...
...Soon, though, the realization burst upon the people who run TV stations—or rather burst upon one and the rest rushed to copy—that local news could make big bucks...
...Network affiliates—most stations back then—preceded the network's 15-minute evening newscasts with their own quarter-hour segments...
...The result, a pamphlet entitled Pavlov s TV Dogs, let loose on local newscasts, accusing them of "masquerading as news...
...So, at least, we are informed by Rocky Mountain Media Watch, a Denver-based organization that deployed volunteers in 58 cities across the United States to videotape local broadcasts that evening...
...Still, not to worry: Rocky Mountain Media Watch has another pamphlet to sell you, also for $10...
...Emotion is honey for the advertising bee...
...It's safe to conjecture that the station reaches barely beyond Eugene and its agricultural environs (what in earlier times was called its milkshed...
...Murder, among the least common of crimes, is the one most reported on television...
...In print, as on the air, Klite complained that "stations cover not only the crime event itself, but also the search, the scene, the arrest, the trial, the verdict, the sentencing, and the victim...
Vol. 80 • March 1997 • No. 5
