On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Our Newest Journalism By Reuven Frank Imagine for a moment that you are a contemporary American Joseph Goebbels, and your job is not to formulate, but to disseminate,...
...They come one at a time— one felon, one adulteress, one pathetic victim, one heroic rescuer, one pyromaniac...
...It is especially fierce among the morning shows and the evening magazines, and turns outright unruly when it involves the star anchors of those programs—even within the networks themselves...
...The other shows boasted about the character of their audiences...
...Our viewers have a higher level of income and education, according to Nielsen, and are more likely to buy your book...
...A story that will clutch at the heart of every American parent...
...The following spring, the resulting interview will receive the Emmy for Newsmaker Interview of the Year...
...Letters will be written, signed not by bookers but by the stars of journalism themselves, the beloved and trusted anchors of morning programs and evening magazine shows...
...She alone will grope and stumblebackto civilization...
...Initially, these "feeds" were scraps from the table, stories that did not make CBS' Walter Cronkite newscast or NBC's HuntleyBrinkley Report...
...And even more attractive than interviews with the intrinsically well-known (e.g., movie stars, political figures or outstanding athletes) are segments featuring people who acquire sudden fame for some singular achievement or for their involvement in a dramatic event...
...Germans may be celebrated for discipline, but in America we worship efficiency...
...For example, in June when the Supreme Court ruled on the privacy issue in a gay sex case from Texas, most stations across the country sought out local legal experts for commentary...
...It is tailor-made for some future Minister of Propaganda...
...Editorial commentary could be similarly controlled...
...Sinclair can therefore be expected to buy more stations and reach more Americans as soon as the right business opportunities present themselves...
...The three old networks have for decades provided their affiliates with rations of national and international taped news stories to flesh out their locally produced newscasts—which are, not coincidentally, far and away the major source of income for most TV stations...
...Its owner is Sinclair Broadcasting, one of about a dozen "groups" (including the networks) that own most of the TV stations in the United States...
...As an industry phenomenon, the possible permutations of CentralCasting are endless...
...They will mention not only the desirability of the audience their program reaches, but also something personal linking the established star to the temporary celebrity, a commonality of interest, a parallel upbringing, a shared zodiac sign, anything will do: "Like you, I was a Girl Scout, a Leo, a county fair blue-ribbon winner...
...Eventually ABC and CBS introduced morning shows, and life was no longer quite so simple for executive producers or their bookers...
...Jessica D. Lynch...
...For the TV Big Name Interview is now another feature of the Newest Journalism...
...Since each network owns stations that can reach the 35 per cent limit or even more, adopting the Sinclair model would be perfect for them...
...Bookers were forced to develop new skills...
...Over the years, news services for network affiliates have expanded, moved to right-to-work states to escape the writers', directors' and craft unions, and taken on lives of their own...
...In its early stages, the competition came down to the matter of clout...
...It is called "CentralCasting"—one word, unlike Central Casting, the legendary Hollywood office that supplied "types" for minor roles in movies...
...Until now, because of the popularity of late-evening local news programs, these network services probably comprised America's most important source of national and international news...
...The challenge is the same for you as it is for someone trying to draw attention to a movie or to extol the virtues of a brand of soup: How do you cover the daunting variety of avenues through which the public can be reached...
...We have come a long way from free airfare and a few days in a New York hotel, including room service...
...His observations are usually of the order that taxes are too high, government is too big, plus other opinions that would not be out of place in the locker room of any exclusive country club...
...THE WHOLE PROCESS was revealed to a shocked laity when a New York Times reporter got hold of a letter a CB S News senior vice president wrote to Pfc...
...In one day, he could lay out his schedule of live interview guests for the next three months...
...In its Maryland studios Sinclair puts together news, sports and weather programs for its outlets in Flint, Michigan, Rochester, New York, Raleigh, North Carolina, Oklahoma City, etc...
...Boy, does it work...
...It is a miracle of modern communications technology...
...Then along came cable, Ted Turner and CNN...
...Indeed, many details of the Sinclair procedure must be seen as lessons in efficiency by the networks...
...The fourth broadcast network...
...It sits in Maryland, in the suburbs of Baltimore, and provides packaged newscasts to localities thousands of miles away...
...Because Sinclair owns its stations, it has the power to force-feed them segments like Hyman's The Point...
...Well, maybe not a metaphor for American life...
...The law allows a group to own stations reaching 35 per cent of the population, and legislation is in the works to raise the limit to 45 per cent...
...But if you appear for them before coming on our show, we won't use you...
...The facility itself is called News Central...
...With all profits going to the conglomerates, it didn't take long for someone to think of using their resources to create greater profits...
...one record breaker...
...America is not America for nothing, however...
...Although he is not so identified, the Washmgton Post discovered that Hyman is Sinclair Broadcasting's vice president for corporate relations...
...The booker seeks out, and then schedules—or "books"—newsworthy guests for interviews...
...What drama...
...Without waiting for such questions to be settled, conscious only of her Pentagon-assisted status as a media heroine, the CBS News letter cited possible perks available from the Viacom empire in its attempt to entice her to sit for a two-hour television interview...
...Intergalactic Enterprises, the biggest of the competing conglomerates, will getpretty specific about appearances in music videos and only slightly less so about a commercial recording...
...It is journalism, isn't it...
...their contact books became thicker, their telephone bills larger...
...This all began rather quietly in the 1950s, with the debut of NBC's Today show...
...But surely a get worth getting...
...Yet they represent only the early stages of the evolution that has spawned Sinclair's centralized production of individual local newscasts for dozens of cities...
...Centrally produced local news programs would create a new source of profit for television's proprietary behemoths...
...On television, far more than in other media, conducting an interview with someone famous is crucial to the presentation of news...
...Imagine yourself meeting your fans at Tower Records...
...The competition for interviews with the latter has grown increasingly intense in recent years...
...She might be the sole survivor of a junior high school mountain-climbing party that lost its way in a snowstorm...
...Tabloid topics are not generic...
...Each has its own newscaster, sportscaster and weather girl...
...That would leave their news divisions with the far more profitable morning programs and so-called magazines...
...Barbara Walters does it...
...Telephone calls and more letters will follow...
...The prize—by this time our bucolic heroine and her family have signed with an agent—will finally go to Associated Transglobal...
...A metaphor for life in America in these troubled and uncertain times...
...What happens at this state-of-the-art facility near Baltimore is a species of the Newest Journalism...
...Turner offered to sell, at nominal fees, access to his worldwide, aroundthe-clock news-gathering organization...
...The real possibility of a book deal will be hinted at, but no promises, mind you...
...The conglomerates that own the TV networks also happen to own book publishers, so the possibility of seeing their life story between hard covers was dangled before the more literate celebrities being courted...
...So there you are, trying to carry out your assigned mission and spread your ugly message to almost 300 million people, in 50 states, over thousands of VHF and UHF radio and TV stations, as well as cable networks and local cable outlets...
...And you ask me why I cry...
...Perhaps shortly we can expect an even younger heroine, a pretty 13-year-old girl, say, with pigtails, braces on her teeth and baggy jeans...
...It was still unclear whether or not she had fought off Iraqi soldiers with her rifle and had subsequently been tortured, or otherwise maltreated, in the Iraqi hospital where she was placed...
...When the first bulletins ding on the AP wire, bookers will be shaken from their beds to plot strategies and initiate campaigns...
...Viacom's movie division, she was told, would consider her courageous story a high priority...
...SOME industry analysts believe the old networks'supper-time newscasts are staggering toward collapse...
...But for a rabid demagogue with a vicious doctrine to proclaim, they would make at the very least a convenient labor-saving device...
...In an act of self-protection, the networks fattened their news services to affiliates, so that their supper-time news broadcasts, the star vehicles of their journalism, would come on the air following local newscasts that frequently had already let the day's big stories out of the bag...
...When a desired guest was being wooed by more than one program, muscles would be flexed...
...There is also enough staff in those places to do an occasional local story that can easily be integrated into what is beamed from Maryland...
...What heroism...
...The booker of the highest-rated morning show once told a potential guest, "If you appear for us, you can probably get a later date on [a competing program...
...For certain self-identified news programs, the "get"—successful recruitment of the celebrity of the moment—emerged as the key act of journalism...
...Back then one Today executive producer would shut himself up at the beginning of each calendar quarter with all the book publishers' advance lists...
...On Television Our Newest Journalism By Reuven Frank Imagine for a moment that you are a contemporary American Joseph Goebbels, and your job is not to formulate, but to disseminate, a message of hate...
...its MTV networks might invite her to host a music video program, and gather some of their top performers to present an all-star rock concert in her little of hometown in West Virginia...
...Fox, had no daily news program for its affiliates (although the Fox cable network did), but soon felt obliged to provide news material...
...But you have to get past hundreds of selfimportant executives, heading hundreds of impenetrable bureaucracies, before you can saturate the country...
...Yes, it must be journalism...
...Viewers tuned in to Sinclair stations, by contrast, received their interpretation from the Baltimore chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union...
...When the late Secretary of State Dean Rusk let his staff talk him into going on television to justify some policy, he invariably signed up for one morning program because its anchor asked the most gentle questions...
...She will lead a rescue party, but when they climb back up, all the others will have perished...
...Further considerations soon crept in...
...Sinclair's News Central provides a daily one-minute segment written and delivered by Mark Hyman...
...No one route or three routes or dozen routes can reach everybody, yet that is precisely your task...
...As the booker's role has expanded, the booker's bag of enticements has been distended...
...The accountants at the conglomerates that own the networks undoubtedly find them appealing...
...The next stage was the tabloidization of television news, which roughly coincided with the ingestion of the networks by huge conglomerates...
...And it works...
...Thus a young swimming champion received a free trip to a theme park with her whole family...
...Celebrities mean ratings, ratings mean money, and conglomerates like money...
...The first of what promises to be a mighty handful of centralized and centrally controlled news-emanation factories has been discovered by an enterprising reporter from the Washington Post...
...Sinclair's 62 stations reach, in aggregate, almost one quarter of Americans...
...Again, imagine for a moment that you are the booker for a television news program...
...On the contrary, it grew steadily more hectic as the scope of the live interview reached beyond authors to stars of entertainment and high-ranking individuals in government and politics...
...She was recovering at the Army's Walter Reed Hospital from injuries suffered during the war in Iraq when the convoy carrying her ordnance outfit made a wrong turn and was captured...
...Those who have seen it have seen the future...
...Who could pass up their offer...
...Not only books and records and trips to theme parks, but a houseful of electrical appliances for her family and a nuclear power plant for her hometown...
Vol. 86 • July 2003 • No. 4
