On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Redesigning the News By Reuven Frank I yearn for a local newscast with an anchor who is bald, a coanchor who is brunette going on gray, a sports guy who speaks softly, and a...
...They are not at fault...
...And there were lots of pictures for those who had trouble reading...
...Enron...
...Then Company A reduces its requirement for decorative wood and hardware—a substantial savings...
...For a long time the accepted function of news was simply to satisfy curiosity...
...In television, networks sell audiences to their advertisers...
...Around the country that hour shortly became two hours—in some cases three...
...The last thing kids want out of a college education today is to learn how to be a better citizen...
...Why the momingization of the evening news and the localization of the network news...
...Despite elitist sniffling, it qualified by any standards as a legitimate major crime story...
...The competition becomes increasingly heated...
...The gap between the surplus of airtime and the supply of actual news was an important factor in the egregious overemphasis given this past August by the all-news cable channels to undocumented accusations that John Kerry had falsified his military record...
...News was redesigned to appeal not to the average American but to the lowest common denominator...
...Only Walter Lippmann could untangle the subtleties of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but you seldom hear those three names anymore...
...Journalism was neither a priestly calling nor a scholarly pursuit...
...What happened to news, apparently while we weren't looking...
...ACRYSTALLIZING EVENT was the murder trial of O.J...
...After O.J., cable began to seize on any potentially shocking crime story—Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy...
...Then an alert West Coast station manager realized he could replace a few expensive syndicated programs with more news...
...I may nothavebeenmuchhelp, but I saw up close how hard those people worked...
...The staff was already on his payroll, the equipment eating away at his capital budget...
...Not only in the United States, but throughout the Western world, journalism was considered a raffish trade, hovering on the edge of the demimonde...
...But those who make this charge fail to define what it is that makes news entertainment, let alone why they find it entertaining...
...Consider the morning programs, once credited by even the New York Times with "setting the day's agenda" for America...
...Local news worked on a "five, five and five" system—five minutes of news, five of sports, five of weather...
...Where would you say the line was crossed...
...In the wake of these three round-the-clock networks, local 24-hour cable news services sprouted in most U. S. metropolitan areas...
...There is no more actual news than in the past, but there are more places to find it, especially on TV, and many more hours devoted to it...
...The result was a progressive lowering of standards...
...Before long 15 minutes became a half hour, for both the networks and local affiliates...
...Every TV news organization transmitted the mesmerizing live pictures, and the cable channels fleshed out their incessant attention with expert lawyers, police witnesses and rumor purveyors...
...Company C strikes out its plan to use a world-renowned architect...
...This was the news immortalized in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play The Front Page and in the stage and film productions of the musical Chicago...
...The network evening newscasts, many now say, merely purvey entertainment...
...The years between the World Wars saw the rise of tabloids, the sob sisters, the smuggled photograph of an electrocution, the Lindbergh baby—kidnapping, trial, execution...
...Keep in mind, too, that costs are controlled by management, so when profits falter heads roll...
...Shaw attributes the problem to the audience: "Too many people these days are intellectually lazy...
...That changed when, with World War II almost upon us, Alfred Hitchcock dressed Joel McCrea in a trench coat for Foreign Correspondent, and Edward R. Murrow assembled a team of college graduates to report on what was expected to be the ultimate battle for civilization...
...Their so-called magazine programs, with the honorable exception of 60 Minutes, have regaled us with reunions of long-separated twins, tales of crime and rascality, and mysterious inexplicable phenomena...
...Although it presumes to pass judgment on all the news media, the examples are drawn, without exception, from television...
...Rather, it seems to me, the detractors really mean that television news suppliers are trying too hard to be interesting...
...In this context "entertainment" becomes a pejorative, and journalism that makes it an objective is pandering...
...The rest of the network news department programs and the fare on the 24/7news cable channels have undergone more drastic alterations...
...Television stations rely on networks and on programs bought from syndicators to fill their schedules...
...Tex McCrary...
...No one complained then that news was devolving into mere entertainment...
...It should be said that the first 15 minutes of the nightly network newscasts still almost always offer a dependable, quick overview of the day's goings on...
...Soft" news dominates, with emphasis on minor medical breakthroughs to appeal to the aging audience that is the target of those stomach acid and denture adhesive commercials...
...Subjects that were the province of supermarket tabloids are now accorded full network coverage...
...After the first round, Company A trims its profit margin by .5 per cent...
...Quality newspapers sold their ad space to the likes of Tiffany's and Saks Fifth Avenue, while the rest promoted the Pep Boys and proclaimed "The Heartbreak of Psoriasis...
...Only a limited number of people are interested in news at any given time, yet their choices increased exponentially— and the competition for their attention likewise...
...Once TV news began to attract professional journalists from newspapers and wire services, they agitated for more time...
...On Television Redesigning the News By Reuven Frank I yearn for a local newscast with an anchor who is bald, a coanchor who is brunette going on gray, a sports guy who speaks softly, and a weatherman who is not auditioning for stand-up comedy...
...My friends say I'm a snob...
...Its prominent practitioners were well-known: Joe Patterson...
...That's how you wind up with Enron...
...They still provide snippets of information, and they can be rearranged to make room for truly earthshaking events...
...The popular image of a newspaper reporter in that era had a man with his tie loose and his fedora perched precariously on his head, typing rapidly with his two index fingers...
...Arthur Brisbane...
...News must make money, so costs must be kept low and ratings high...
...Newspapers gleefully reported the fact to prove the shallowness of television news...
...I don't mean to deny that there has always been serious—then called "quality"—news coexisting with the popular press: news of the troubled world, details of economic upheavals in faraway places, the endless proceedings of legislatures and international bodies...
...All they're concerned with is career preparation___You wind up with people working for, and maybe at the top of, major industries who have no interest in institutions and in our cultural and moral environment, and that's a real national problem...
...Thomas Patterson of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government says, "Young people are increasingly growing up in homes where they don't see their parents reading a newspaper every day, so they don't associate that act with being a worthwhile activity, with being an adult...
...Hence, more reporters flock to every story, and more events are covered that would have gone unnoticed were there fewer vacant minutes to fill...
...David Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic of the Los Angeles Times, dealt with the phenomenon in a recent essay headlined, "News as Entertainment Is Sadly Becoming the Norm...
...What has happened to news, in other words, is the result of increasingly intense competition for audience...
...Simpson...
...Company ? drastically cuts its landscaping scheme, while Company C switches to a lower grade of windows...
...News coverage has been transformed because, suddenly, there is too much of it...
...Meaningless news coverage abounded...
...That charge would only emerge after television appeared and became the American public's prime source ofinformation...
...The revolution arrived when the visionary Ted Turner unveiled CNN, "All news, all the time.' Complacent oldtimers dubbed it the Chicken Noodle Network, but it soon winnowed out early bad hires and incompetents...
...In fact, the scramble for viewers among the networks and cable news channels can be compared to that of several construction companies trying to best one another in bidding for a lucrative contract...
...The second 15 minutes are sometimes interesting, but rarely do they consist of current news demanding immediate attention...
...At Company B, the purchasing people find a new cement supplier who may be less reliable than their usual one but is much cheaper...
...Critics grumble that even if the stories are legitimate news, their coverage has been excessive...
...But their usual fare today is a mix of what women's magazines used to call "service" features—how to cook, sew, lose weight—plus a smattering of author promotions, celebrity appearances and vaudeville turns...
...Ed Sullivan...
...The emphasis of Shaw and his academic experts on audience demand is misplaced...
...Furthermore networks, having become small parts of enormous conglomerates, are now expected to maintain the same respect for profits and for share prices as their fellow components...
...Typically, the only programs they produce themselves are news programs...
...Next Bill Gates, the proprietor of Microsoft, eager to extend his software empire into "content," used some of his wealth to underwrite MSNBC with his new partner, the General Electric subsidiary NBC...
...The networks have not quite followed suit, but they have not ignored such stories altogether...
...Company ? decides it can use fewer supervising executives and eliminates a dozen jobs...
...Enough others came along to make it all worthwhile...
...I suspect they would agree it is not the sort of diversion envisioned by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz in their song for the film musical The Band Wagon: The clown with his pants falling down, Or the dance that's a dream of romance, Or the scene where the villain is mean, THAT'S entertainment...
...The engineers at Company A, under heavy pressure from management, reluctantly agree that a cheaper grade of reinforcing rods would be tenable...
...A colleague once called me a network chauvinist who never appreciated the dedication of local news staffs or the quality of their performance...
...Interview shows have turned into forums for insult and obloquy...
...Meanwhile, the consensus that it was the Federal Communications Commission's job to enforce standards has eroded as a result of its deliberate lack of enforcement...
...Damon Runyon...
...Shouting has become an acceptable form of argument...
...They want prepackaged news—news presented in small, entertaining bites and delivered with edge, with attitude (which for much of the day's news means a particular viewpoint, a partisan or ideological bias...
...The judge allowed complete live TV coverage of the trial, then conducted it clumsily...
...News was indeed entertainment then, cheap entertainment that unlettered immigrants, toiling all day with their hands and backs, could afford...
...Stations had their traffic helicopters take live shots of police cars chasing speeders on the freeway...
...Celebrity interviews, one of the cheapest ways to fill time, became standard fare...
...For confirmation he trots out the usual professors, who predictably agree that the demand for entertaining news comes from young people...
...to expose how governments are wasting your money, among other staples of bar-and-grill populism...
...Robert Calvert of DePauw University puts a socioeconomic spin on this conclusion: "The wealthier a society is, the more self-consciously individualistic it is and the less an individual feels obliged to consider things outside oneself and one's immediate interest...
...He "led into" his local half hour news with another 30 minutes of news...
...But to the cable producers, they are more compelling than the available alternatives...
...For most of my years in management at NBC, several local news operations at the stations the network owned (as opposed to those with which it had affiliation contracts) were my responsibility...
...Company A, now desperate, hires someone to approach the chief financial officer of the contracting company to suggest a kickback...
...Simpson, a highachieving football hero, known outside the world of sports for his appearances in TV commercials and movies, was a ready-made Othello...
...the problem lies within the television industry itself...
...With so much at stake, management at Company C decides to risk hiring call girls to entrap executives of the contracting company in embarrassing situations...
...Not true...
...Walter Winchell...
...Newscasts have developed recurring features with titles like "Hey, Taxpayer...
...Fox followed with its heavy ideological bent, its reliance on talk and interviews more than news, and its cocky willingness to ignore the folkways of traditional journalism...
...Occasionally he reached for a flask of bootleg whiskey in a desk drawer that also contained the first three chapters of the Great American Novel...
...Gradually CNN established itself as a reliable news service around the clock and around the globe...
...The evolution of the news has been a many-faceted affair...
...Repetition crept in...
...Walter Cronkite famously laid the script for his 15 -minute newscast against the front page of the New York Times to show that it barely covered two columns...
...The gross income of local news may often be less than that of entertainment shows, but their costs are usually lower, providing a larger net profit...
...In the early days of television, network nightly news lasted 15 minutes, as did the local stations' news...
...Live exclusive" entered wide use as a draw, like truffle shavings in your scrambled eggs...
...The notion that a highly profitable network can occasionally present aprogram forreasonsofpublic policy or professional prestige is obsolete...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
