Tag Archives: tv news

A View From The Pasture

I’m reading about the “Tik Toc Generation.” What’s that? Is that even a thing? Did I misspell it correctly?

Feeling very much left in the dust. I don’t even have a smartwatch, but feel as though I should get one to signify that I am not completely irrelevant. I can’t imagine what’s going through young people’s minds with regard to anything, much less whether they give a damn about anything other than climate change which they apparently worry about a great deal. As they should. I see a former colleague has written a book, or perhaps I should say another book, about the early days of tv news in Los Angeles. Does anybody care?

I’m a guy who has multiple Emmys, a wall covered with various other awards from multiple organizations, including a Peabody, as I happened to have been with KTLA when George Holliday called CNN – only to be put on hold – so he called us and asked if we wanted his video of the cops beating the hell of some guy in Lake View Terrace. Just days later, a 15 year-old black girl, Latahsa Harlens, was shot and killed by a convenience store owner in South Central in a dispute over a $2 bottle of OJ. Not that any of this matters, but these and other factors did eventually contribute to causing the Los Angeles riots. I covered all of it.

At varying times, I also chased OJ up the 405 freeway in a news van and flew around South Dakota in a converted DC-3 with George McGovern, as he campaigned to get his senate seat back. I also got the very first and exclusive interview with John Z. DeLorean, following his acquittal on a charge of cocaine trafficking. Don’t remember John Z? Think “Back to the Future,” with Michael Fox.

I’m the guy who broke the story about the mammoth Casmalia toxic waste dump. A 252-acre superfund site that made the 17-acre Stringfellow site look like a kiddie pool. I was also one of the first journalists to arrive at the Bundy murder scene in Brentwood, I may have been the first reporter, in fact, when the bodies had yet to be covered and a river of blood flowed down the walkway. Carl Stein, a photog for CBS, was there before us.

There’s much more, like the invention of ENG and live news coverage in the mid-70’s, when we switched from film to tape, as well as the very first wall-to-wall live trial coverage featuring legal experts. You can blame us, broadcasters of my place in time, for what’s currently being done on MSNBC and CNN. We invented all that stuff for the Simpson trials. I was being called a “legal analyst” at the time, even though I never spent a day in law school.

There was also the “synergy” thing, when my boss, the Tribune Company, bought the Los Angeles Times, or specifically, the Times Mirror Company, which owned the newspaper. The price, as I recall, was something north of $6 billion. They came to me and wanted to know if I would be the go-between for KTLA-TV and the newspaper in an attempt to get those of us on the tv side working in some kind of partnership with the print journalists at the paper – most of whom hated those of us on the broadcast side. And so, I took a desk at the Los Angeles Times, and became one of the very first of only a handful of journalists to try and make cross-platform journalism or so-called “synergy,” work. I eventually got it done, although the effort put me in Cedars-Sinai, with a heart attack.

I have more than 40 years in the news biz and have offered my services as a speaker to two institutions of higher learning here in Maryland. Neither, favored me with a response. They used to at least send out a form letter. Now, you get nothing. This is all very interesting to me, in that UCLA asked me twice to teach an extension course back in the days when I was covering Simpson, and had no time to do anything else. Just goes to show, I guess, that when you’re hot you’re hot, and when you’re not, you’re out in the pasture flinging cow pies baked hard by the sun.

Thank you for listening, or reading, actually, not that specificity matters much any more. Not in this era of click-bait creativity and doing whatever gets you by with the least effort and highest degree of cost-effectiveness. Not that long ago, I actually thought the emphasis on hair and makeup was a problem.

(Originally published in the “Back Focus” group on Facebook)

And Now, A Word About Words

When and why did reporters begin referring to elementary school property or a high school as having a “campus?” For decades the term campus referred only to colleges and universities. Didn’t it? Am I being overly critical? I suppose if caps can be hats and anything with four wheels can be a car then a grade school can have a campus.

Remember when people in the business used to care about such things and correct others for their improper usage? That may be what’s happening. Or not happening. Those who know better are afraid of correcting anybody, so the degree of incorrect usage just grows making it difficult to home-in on a solution with so many people running around trying to “hone-in” on it.

Eventually, the incorrect usage becomes acceptable, so why worry? Webster’s now accepts “amirite” as a replacement word for the phrase “am I right?” Sick, isn’t it?

My personal theory is that this is all a part of human evolution. From our current youthful “fast-talkers,” who jamalltheirwordstogether to our next level, which will be total telepathic communication. “TTC” for short, which will come into being when fast-talking becomes inadequate because it will be too slow. That’ll be really sick, won’t it?

A Sanitized Version Of TV News

Question for all the journos out there:  Is it okay to sanitize broadcast news?   Does this bother you,  or is it just me?

When does editing cross over into censorship?

Yesterday one of the tv news shows here in the Baltimore area sanitized not one but two stories, all in the same hour.   It was not the Sinclair station, nor was it Fox.  It was one of the “big-3” network affiliates.

First, they did the story on the apparent suicide of Kate Spade, without including the information that she apparently hanged herself with a scarf tied to a doorknob.

Then, they did the story about the Mayor of Philadelphia responding to the President disinviting the Philadelphia Eagles to a celebration at the White House, without including the Mayor’s most biting criticism of the President..   The statement from the Mayor the tv news show opted not to include was, “…our president is not a true patriot, but a fragile egomaniac obsessed with crowd size and afraid of the embarrassment of throwing a party to which no one wants to attend.”

It’s difficult for me to understand how someone commits suicide by tying a scarf to a doorknob.   So maybe it wasn’t suicide?  So maybe that should have been included in the story?  Also, the Mayor’s comments about President Trump, are kind of essential to doing a complete story on what the Mayor had to say, right?   This wasn’t some unknown man on the street interview, it was the Mayor of one of the biggest cities in America.

I knew both these stories had been “sanitized” (not just edited, but censored) because I read newspapers.   Many people do not, so they don’t have the advantage of staying properly informed.   Well, they have the advantage, but they choose not to use it, which makes the job the broadcast outlets are doing all the more critical.

Is it just me, or is something very basically wrong going on here?   Isn’t our job to find out what the hell is going on,  you know, the famous “5-W’s,” and then tell our viewers about it, warts and all?

 

Needed: A Little More Experience And A Little Less Snappy Banter

CNN’s media maven,  Brian Stelter, has suggested that the public needs to be skeptical of both the President and the media’s coverage of the President.   The house is on fire, and he wants to conduct an academic argument about which way to point the hose.

John Berman and Poppy Harlow are sitting there taking it all in, treating the 31 year old Stelter as though he’s some great sage, even though he hadn’t been born when the Watergate hearings took place.   He would have been nine  during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.   Give me a break.

The press and the intelligence community may be the only bodies standing between the nation and fascism.   The press needs all the support it can get right now to deal with the Administration’s lies and constant deflection of the issues.   The legitimate press is under attack.  Stelter, and others of his generation, may not have been around long enough to understand what’s really going on.   They don’t have the advantage of having lived through the Nixon years and more.  Bill Carter, was there when Nixon and Agnew tried to pin it all on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” in the press.  He remembers Cronkite going to Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and Dan Ellsberg.  He knows better.   He was on the show and he should have said something.   A media critic himself, perhaps he felt constrained against speaking out against a colleague.   Perhaps it would have impacted his tenure with CNN.   Or maybe they just ran out of time.

Stelter, needs to sort out the mainstream “real” media covering the White House from all the rest of what has become an explosion of media outlets, particularly those interested in taking sides politically or going for entertainment value.  No one is infallible.  Everyone is capable of making a mistake.   But I trust the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, CBS News and a few other outlets to give me an objective and fair version of what’s going on.

There remains no substitute for experience.  No amount of book learning, no number of  hours sitting in a classroom listening to someone tell you how something is done, or how it feels when it’s done to you.  Too many younger people with too little experience moving up the tv news food chain way too fast is part of the reason television news has lost so much of its credibility, something the networks are now in a position to recover from, if they fully resume their proper role of national watchdog.

To do that, they need to bring back a few more less beautiful but more experienced folks, like Carl Bernstein.   Some of the younger reporters out there are excellent.  I admire the hell out of the job they’re doing, but there remains no substitute for experience. Right now we need both, the vigor of youth and the power of experience, in an industry that’s obsessed with an advertiser-driven focus on selling products to younger market.

The consequences for a nation which increasingly can’t differentiate between valid and “fake” news are too severe for anyone to think otherwise.