Consult THIS!
The movie Network predicted it almost thirty years ago, and with jaw-dropping accuracy. In case you haven't seen it, the film is about the newscast at the fictional UBS network. The aging anchor Howard Beale, in an amazing performance by Peter Finch, is losing viewers daily, and the network has just been bought by a huge media giant, the Communications Corporation of America. The first thing that the huge media corporation does is turn over the news division to the entertainment division, and the first thing the entertainment division does is fire Howard Beale. After he hears, Beale goes on the air and tells the viewers that he is being victimized by the quest for higher ratings. He begins a rant that concludes with him exhorting the viewers to go to their windows and shout "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Remarkably, people do go to their windows and do just that. Word of mouth spreads like wildfire, and pretty soon Howard Beale is making the ratings meters overheat. Beale is kept on, and gradually the newscast becomes a circus, with an astrologer and a studio audience.
Writer Paddy Chayefski and director Sidney Lumet missed the mark, but only by a little, and we may yet hit or exceed their prediction. Folks, what I'm going to tell you right now is essentially what Howard Beale told his viewers in that memorable rant.
Studies show that most people who get any news at all get most or all of their news from television. The problem with that is that news departments, particularly on the local level, have become ratings slaves, and that in their relentless quest to get higher ratings they hire consultants to tell them how to get higher ratings. Some of those very studies that I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph are generated by consulting firms, which is why this problem is both a maze and a conundrum. I hope we can find our way out of it.
Once upon a time, and it wasn't even all that long ago, news divisions at the networks and the local stations were pretty much autonomous. They lost money. All the time. Year after year. But that was okay because what the news divisions did was inform the public, and broadcasters entrusted with the PUBLIC airwaves felt that was a vital service. I capitalized "public" because they are our airwaves. Every single one of them. We allow the broadcasters to use them, but we demand that they do something for us in return, such as keep us informed. The tv stations and networks still made plenty of money to offset the losses incurred by the news division, so everybody went home happy at the end of the day.
[Pictured: Roone Arledge]
But not so fast there, Bunky! Suddenly the 1980's came and Ronald Reagan de-regulated everything he could get his hands on, and one of the first was the broadcasting industry. It's been all downhill from there. Since broadcasters were no longer required to prove that they served their viewers and communities (a process that was called ascertainment), one of the first things they decided was that those news divisions were going to have to start carrying some of their own weight. News divisions were merged into entertainment divisions. At ABC, Roone Arledge - the man who had brought us The Wide World of Sports, The American Sportsman, and countless hours of Olympics coverage - was named the head of the news division, and he immediately started to put his stamp it.
Your local station is in an even worse situation. Very few local television stations produce any entertainment programming, and the few that do aren't breaking the bank doing it. The biggest money maker at your local station is the News Department, and believe me, they feel that responsibility. In fact, I have heard an executive stand in front of a roomful of news people and tell them in so many words that their only responsibility is to ratings, and that journalism is secondary.
What does this mean to you? It means that there is probably an awful lot going on in your town that you aren't hearing about, but that you're hearing about nearly every assault, robbery, rape and murder. It means that on your Eleven O'clock News you will see a reporter "live," standing outside of a dark building where something happened seven hours ago. It means that a story further down in the newscast will be "teased" to death until the story finally runs and you find out that there's nothing new to see. All the footage has been used "teasing" the story. It means that your news department's weather personnel are getting oodles of dollars worth of technology thrown at them, and they're still no better at predicting the weather than the old guy years ago who used to draw on a paper map with a Magic Marker.
How did this happen? How did it come to this?
One word: consultants.
Just as films and tv series' are tested with audiences before they are allowed to go into general release, the entertainment types who were now running the news departments decided that it would be a great idea to have some research conducted into ways that ratings, and therefore advertising revenue, could be increased. So consulting firms were hired to advise news departments on ways that they could get more people to watch their newscasts.
People, "consulting" has to be just about the biggest racket that any cynical-minded MBA has ever dreamed up. The "research" they conduct consists of all sorts of devices, from cold calling to buttonholing people at the shopping mall. The trick is to ask the kinds of questions which support the results you want to get. For instance, research shows that the biggest reason people watch local news is for "weather information." Now you and I know that what that term means is, "I want to know whether I have to wear/carry a jacket/coat/umbrella tomorrow." But the consulting firm turns this into an urgent need to throw vast amounts of money into "weather prediction technology," and to break into programming each and every time that water falls, through some strange and terrifying process, from the sky.
Why is that reporter standing in front of that dark building? Because "Would you watch a newscast that features live reporting?" is a staple question of consulting firms. When you, without thinking through the dire consequences of your answer, reply "Why, yes, of course. A station needs to be able to report live events and breaking stories," you have helped to set the whole process into motion.
"And what was that you just said about breaking news? Would you consider that to be important?" the phone bank worker breathlessly asks you.
"Absolutely," you reply, thinking of 9/11, Oklahoma City, assassinations and wars. Little did you know that your answer would mean that that new episode of CSI: Miami you've been looking forward to has been broken into, so that you could know that there is a really bad four-car pileup on the circle freeway.
Consulting firms are ruining broadcasting, and as I said, they are a scam. Brilliantly thought out and as fiendishly cynical as anything I've ever encountered, but still nothing more than a scam. I have seen a consulting firm hired by the station where I work tell us that we "need more chatter at the anchor desk." We're told that viewers have a need to identify with the folks at the anchor desk, and that can only happen if we let them chat with each other. The next year, we were told that we needed to de-emphasize the anchor desk. Viewers felt that all the chatter got in the way of the conveying of useful information. So we only came out to an anchor on camera when it was absolutely necessary. The very next year, we were told "Viewers don't know who your anchors are. You need to humanize them." Wonder of wonders, anchor desk chatter returns. I swear to you that this is true.
"How is it that no one sees through this bullshit?" I can hear you saying. "It's as transparent as wet tissue paper, and not even as strong." Well, you're right, of course. The revolving door on the offices of News Directors and General Managers at many stations helps keep the consultants' scams fresh. Also, the stations who don't have the top-rated newscast in your town want very much to overtake that ratings leader. Consultants promise to give them the tools to raise their ratings. And if you're the top-rated newscast, you want to know how to stay on top. Consultants, by the way, never promise that following their advice guarantees high ratings. Does learning that surprise you?
Technology, unfortunately, also plays a part in all of this. When a television station pays several hundred thousand dollars for a new Doppler radar system, you can bet that they're going to want to get their money's worth out of that baby. The only way to make it pay is to use it, and use it a lot. It gets even worse when a station gets its hands on a helicopter. Whether bought or leased, a chopper is an expensive proposition. The thinking goes that "all that money we're pouring into that helicopter isn't doing a damn thing if it's sitting on the ground." So you get the oddity of late afternoon traffic reports (Yep. Sure are a lot of people checking out the evening news before hopping in the car to go home from work), and aerial views of everything from police chases to a cow that escaped from a slaughterhouse. Once again, all of this is completely true.
One of the staples of television news is the "package." This is a "story," a self-contained piece about a specific news item. In a package, you hear the reporter's voice narrating, and there will be sound bites from people who have something to add to the story. The reporter often does a "stand-up" in the package. That's when you see the reporter on camera for a little bit. Stand-ups are great ways to bridge different elements of the story. And give the reporter some face time. The network newscasts are full of packages; in fact they're mostly packages. Not so at your local affiliate. There packages are something special, and you only get a few of them in every half-hour newscast. And those packages are getting shorter and shorter. Because consulting firms have taken note of your lack of attention span, that's why. While a package on the Nightly Evening News Tonight might easily run over two minutes, your local reporter is under pressure to get his or her story told in one minute and ten seconds. Oh sure, they're told, if it runs a little long, a minute-twenty's acceptable, but try to shoot for that minute-ten. Once a reporter gets browbeaten by an aggressive, ratings-hungry News Director a few times for going over the mark, that minute-ten starts getting more and more attainable. The first thing to get chucked out the window in the pursuit of the shorter package is balance in the reporting. Getting and including another point of view on the matter being discussed in the story becomes an expendable part of the process. Balance is, after all, an overrated and outmoded concept. Almost quaint.
Your local station wants to give you what you want to see in a newscast, or so they say. But when push comes to shove, they'd rather listen to the consultants than you. A few weeks ago, a fire broke out at a warehouse in my town in the early evening. My station scrambled all of its resources to bring stunning live pictures of the spectacular fire. We went "wall-to-wall" with coverage, which means that we pre-empted the syndicated programming running at the time, and didn't stop for commercials. As I said, it was a genuine conflagration, so covering it was probably a good thing to do. But there was trouble brewing. At eight o'clock, the Summer Olympics were supposed to be on our air, but we chose to stick with the fire. For nearly another hour and a half. The phones nearly melted down. I'm sure you can imagine that not a single one of those calls came from a person who was saying, "Well done!!! This is so fascinating! Is there any chance that you could tell me one more time what year the warehouse was built, and who has owned it through the years?" No. Every one of those hundreds of people calling was urging us in no uncertain terms to dump the fire coverage. They wanted to see the Olympics, and they wanted them now! But we refused to listen to them. After all, we have data which shows that those viewers actually did want to see that fire more than the Olympics, whether they knew it or not.
This will continue to go on as long as consultants, market researchers, Internet providers, and pollsters continue to cram you and your interests into ever-smaller pigeonholes. I can't offer any easy solutions, but I can give you some advice. When someone calls you on the phone and says that they are doing market research, tell them that you don't participate in phone polls, and then hang up. Don't let them mire you in their slimy data. And tell your local station that consulting firms don't have the faintest idea what people want from a newscast. Then tell them what you want from your local newscast. Tell them that slickly packaged, fast-moving eye candy isn't really your idea of how to stay abreast of the events of the day. Snail mail is your best option is this case, because you taking the time to write out what you want makes them sit up and take notice. All of this may do nothing to help you get a sane, balanced, factual newscast. But at least you'll feel a little better.
There's so much more I could tell you, but I've been advised to try to keep these columns more brief.
You are, of course free to take or leave my advice. There's no charge for it. Just think of me as the anti-consultant.