Several times in recent weeks I have mentioned that as bad as this moment is for newspapers, local TV stations, by some key measurements, are even worse off. Ratings for Twin Cities late news shows are down 15 percent from May ’06 to May ’07, a greater decline than circulation at either of our benighted newspapers.
The reasons for this slide are many, and depending where you are in the TV news food chain … station manager, reporter, scurrilous critic … you tend to saddle up one particular reason and ride it hard.
Me, I’m flogging the notion that, like the standard daily newspaper, local TV news is under such tremendous pressure to produce revenue that it is locking itself deeper and deeper into stale, traditional, audience-appealing formulas, and being far too timid and near-sighted in creating the kind of value important to the most key of “key demographics.” And by that I mean the audience that is looking not just for “news” (car crashes, shootings) — but what the news means in a meaningful, relevant context.
I got off on this tangent again the other night watching Pat Kessler’s latest Reality Check segment on WCCO’s 6 p.m. newscast. I’ve been a fan of Reality Check since WCCO started it and have always had the same complaint: “What’s the problem with making this longer?”
Last week’s segment was devoted to Congressman Keith Ellison’s allegedly incendiary talk before a local atheist group, in which — if you listen to local talk radio and read the usual hysterical blogs — he called George W. Bush the next Hitler. Standard news reporting would state that Ellison was under fire from local Republicans for making a comment comparing Bush to Hitler … before a group of atheists … and this would be buttressed by a comment from some Republican mouthpiece and then balanced by a response from Ellison or one of his mouthpieces. And that would be that. A good day at the office. Mission accomplished, and we’re onto the next story.
The great value of Reality Check is that even at a woefully compacted 80 to 90 seconds, it (Kessler) demonstrates enough instinct for context to include actual original tape, in this case of Ellison calmly and coherently explaining that post-Reichstag Hitler and the Nazis exploited the emotions of the moment to impose rigid and invasive controls on civil liberties similar to what Bush/Cheney have done post 9/11.
OK, so Jason Lewis doesn’t agree with that analogy. But it’s a debatable point that deserves something better than hysterical spin and/or lazy “balance.”
But as Kessler wrapped the segment, I thought what I almost always think: “Come on, Kessler. I’ve got at least three more questions for you to play with. What’s your damned hurry? It’s the middle of July. You got something better than this? Or maybe you gotta go because Douglas has to tell us it’s hot, or maybe Rosen’s got a scoop on the Twins’ latest call-up from Rochester?”
Kessler, of course, is merely a salary slave at WCCO. Decisions on the running time of Reality Check are made out of WCCO news director Jeff Kiernan’s office.
As I laid it out to Kiernan — for the umpteenth time, going back to when Reality Check started — the segment is clearly very popular, particularly with avid news consumers, all of whom I strongly suspect immediately identify it with WCCO-TV … in a highly positive way. (In my view this is a crowd you want to keep satisfied with your product.) The concept of cutting through spin and making credible judgments on hot button topics — particularly those bowdlerized by commercial demagogues — is, or should be, a fundamental process of journalism.
Beyond that, as I pointed out, WCCO is currently devoting far more time — close to five minutes each — to purely promotional Rewind segments in which … its anchors interview and profile each other. Now THAT is dog days programming.
There’s a back story to my Reality Check curiosity that made Kiernan insist on staying off record. But the nut of his defense is that, while Reality Check is popular, there is a balancing act to play. The intramural anchor profile gimmick is, as I read it, part of that balance.
“Those stories,” said Kiernan on the record, “have been a fun way for our viewers to see the people they’ve come to know and respect.”
My argument is that the promotional/personality/celebrity shtick of local TV news is now so well understood, certainly by those aforementioned avid news consumers, that it is veering dangerously close to Simpsons-like parody, and the inflated presence of “stories” like this Rewind stuff, in contrast to the obvious time constraints still placed on Reality Check so long after it has established both its credibility and value leads … a scurrilous critic … to ask if maybe someone hasn’t become a prisoner of a rapidly atrophying formula?
Kiernan, who I regard as a smart, reasonably candid guy, didn’t want to say “yes” to that. But he couldn’t bring himself to flatly and emphatically say “no” either. His job depends on producing a product that returns very high profit levels to Viacom, Inc. The gamble is that he — and his counterparts in local TV news all over the country — can continue supplying those fat profits even as their business gets gets hammered and fragmented by on-line video news and, in the very near future, the convergence of internet and television.
More to the point, the dilemma you can feel ratcheting tighter and tighter with each passing quarter is the consequence of a sort of Faustian bargain. Namely, holding a mass audience with celebrity foo-foo and the stale conventions of cops, mayhem and sports scores, while risking the migration of avid news consumers to sites where they are assured of getting the added value of spin and smoke-cutting analysis.
Finally, a facet of Reality Check I particularly admire is the segment’s willingness to risk the wrath of the trolls. The campy levels of self-promotion sustaining local TV news are all designed to avoid offense, to present every topic — save crime and tragedy — as weirdly neutral. As much as anything the intent is to sustain the personal appeal of the anchors reading such news. By daring to make some kind of conclusive judgment, Reality Check actively invites the predictable barrage of correspondence from whichever camp got gored.
If all this needs a slogan, try, “News with Guts.” Tell me the society soccer moms of Eden Prairie wouldn’t respond to THAT.
Oh, one more thing. If Kessler/Reality Check/WCCO really want to wade into a taboo topic that badly needs an objective assessment, how about a clear-eyed piece on local atheists? With books like Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and now Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great — all enjoying broad readership in an age of roiling religious fanaticism — what kind of guts would it take for a local TV news operation, with their “Please love us, please” promotional mentality, to do a sophisticated feature on that “trend”?
If they dare, they might need more than 80 seconds.
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