WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN to TV News?
Two stories this week prompted that question: the death of the excellent Canadian-born ABC anchor Peter Jennings; and www.cartt.ca’s own feature on the first baby steps of Independent World Television News.
Obviously, very little will happen to TV news in the short term. The world (not to mention the newsrooms of broadcasters) is still so full of baby boomers and others a little older and a little younger who can’t remember – or envision – a TV world without the six o’clock and eleven o’clock news that nothing is going to change immediately.
There’s been much written this week on how we’ll never see the era of the super-anchor – guys (and they’ve always been guys) like Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, with total control of their networks’ evening news programs – ever again. That’s probably true – although in Canada we still have our own mega-newsmen in Peter Mansbridge and Lloyd Robertson and to a lesser-because-he’s-younger-extent, Kevin Newman.
The network news programs on both sides of the border just don’t have the power any more. Well over half of TV viewers would watch the supper hour or late night newscasts in the 1970s, ’80s and even into the ’90s. It was an enormous audience looking for the fastest, most visual way (at the time) to get the news.
Now, that number is something like 20% at best and is often far lower. Still a big audience, but it’s an ageing one.
In the industry, we all say the same thing when asked the reason why news audiences have slipped: Fragmentation. CNN, Fox News, CBC Newsworld, CTV Newsnet, CP24, E!, The Weather Network, The Sports Network, MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, ichannel, CPAC, LCN, The Score, Star!, Sportsnet, ROBTv… people can watch whatever kind of news and current affairs programming they like just about whenever they like.
I could make a never-ending list of web news outlets. And, don’t forget newspapers. I still love my papers (tree-ware, as some smugly say).
There’s so much news that the need for one powerful program and anchor to tell us the way it is has diminished because we’ve already gone and found it out on our own well before six or 11 p.m.
Still, with all of what’s available, TV reigns as the mass media leader – and will likely have that role for a long, long time. So, despite the many options available, some still feel disenfranchised, like there’s no news outlet good enough for them. They want more out of their TV journalism.
Which has led Paul Jay and his backers to launch IWT News, a new news channel dedicated to digging deeper. To Jay, TV news simply doesn’t do a good enough job. He wants more investigative reporting. He wants more good questions asked. He may be onto something, he may not. I’m not exactly sure because, well, I watch so darn little TV news nowadays.
Jennings, however, worried about the same things Jay does. That says to me that IWTN’s chairman might not be off the mark.
Jennings worried about too much fluff. About easy stories (read: filler). About not enough investigative reporting. About the newsreaders becoming personalities.
Jennings earned a reputation as a hard-nosed reporter. It wasn’t hype. It was fact. He reported from Vietnam and Cambodia, from South Africa when it was in the grip of Apartheid. He opened ABC’s first Beirut bureau in 1968 and was bureau chief there for seven years. He knew a great story when he smelled one and knew spin, or BS, when it was flung his way.
Globe and Mail TV critic John Doyle this week pointed to the fact that Jennings was the very opposite of what many news folks have since become.
“Larry King invited viewers to call and ask questions of Jennings,” recounted Doyle, who watched the CNN repeat this week of its Larry King Live show from a year ago, where Jennings was the guest. “One caller, sounding irate about U.S. President George W. Bush, asked this question of him: ‘Do you agree with Helen Thomas, as I do and many of my acquaintances, that this is the worst president this country has ever had?’ Jennings answered, ‘No, ma’am. And if I did, I wouldn’t say so.’”
Anybody think Fox’s Bill O’Reilly would give such a measured response?
Continues Doyle: “Not long ago, Jennings told an interviewer that he was proud of the fact that World News Tonight had never done a story about Laci Peterson, the young, pretty and pregnant woman who was murdered by her philandering husband. He said it set ABC’s marquee news program aside from the competition. It did, and Jennings was correct to be proud of that.”
The Laci Petersons, the O.J. Simpsons, the Runaway Brides – all ridiculous stories that are on television because they’re very easy, salacious stories to do – no thinking required by either the viewer or reporter – and that’s why they get so much air time. Sadly, they also get ratings, which is what TV news is often about. CNN was never more popular than its 24/7 coverage of the O.J. trial.
But all those stories are – like the man who can smoke 100 cigarettes at once, or the girl who can bang a railroad spike up her nose – are curiosities. Runaway Bride stories do not matter – and news shows eating up minutes on them should be ashamed.
What if fragmentation is not the only reason the audience has fallen so precipitously away from network news. What if it’s because viewers can see the same insipid tales of Laci Peterson’s death or O.J. Simpson’s $25,000 DirecTV fine everywhere and don’t want it on their network news – or just find it redundant and change the channel?
What if the airtime would be better spent on investigations into the rampant spending habits of bureaucrats or embezzlement in a government ministry or providing safe drinking water to Indian reserves? What if stories like that were done more often? Would it bring the viewers back?
Maybe that’s the direction network news should be heading because with the audience steadily diminishing, what they’re doing now clearly isn’t working.
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