Vast PBS Wasteland
Monday, March 15th, 1999
Just exactly when did Public Television become this vast wasteland of self-help, where any psuedo-credentialed goofball with graying hair can show up and hustle his 13 Habits of Effective Morons or 12 Ways You Can be Wealthy Without Guilt or 10 Ways of Eating More Multicolored Fiber? And why must we be force-fed this pablum interspersed with interminable pledge breaks from GPTV’s generic annoying hucksters, or WPBA’s very un-generic, very annoying, creepy, big-haired, cloying, overmanicured-fingernails-on-the-blackboard Alicia Ames?
How did these nutcases overtake the formidable walls of the great grey Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Where have all the Great Performances and American Masters and breakthrough documentarians gone? Why has this sub-genre of programming, unworthy of the infomercial format, taken over stations we support with our donations? Where’s Steve and Norm, Julia Child and Fred Rogers, Martin Yan and Rick Steves? (I’ve found all of them annoying on individual occasions—but they tower over this pledge break junk.)
And by the way—we need no more Irish dancing. How about a decent night at the theatre, or rerun some Africa footage from "Nature", or maybe even force me to sit through endless rebroadcasts of "Antiques Roadshow"—just get these fake, dangerous book hucksters off our public airwaves.
* * * * *
WGNX isn’t owned by Tribune Television Stations any more, so they’ve deep-fortysixed their call letters (trivia buffs: the WGN part stands for the "Worlds Greatest Newspaper"—the Chicago Tribune) and are now referring to themselves as "CBS Atlanta," which, yeah, I guess they are. The new owners, Meredith Broadcasting, are said to be planning to pour a ton of money into its news operation to make the station more of a contender in that silly marketplace we call Atlanta local television news. Think that’ll make you watch?
* * * * *
"That 70s Show" had its "season finale" Sunday night, but "will be back with new episodes in the summer." What the heck does that mean? I’m sorry, but if you have a season finale, you’re required by television law to sit and wait quietly for the fall. That’s just the way it is. And you’d be even more confused if you saw "Days Like These," a current British sitcom that takes the exact word-for-word scripts from "That 70s Show," changes a few cultural references, and then throws the pages to a lookalike British cast of poorly-dressed 70s kids—and, well, it works, in a strange parallel-universe way.
* * * * *
One of my favorite things to do these days is listen to newspeople choking on the phrase "Black College Spring Break" in lieu of the much more evocative "Freaknik." The purveyors of the website www.freaknik.com (they also have .org and .net) have no such compunctions—they’re busy selling the name and the idea of the party—the actual physical reality of what happens the third week of April doesn’t really make much difference to them.
I thought I’d check local media websites and see how they referred to this event—but WXIA, WAGA, and WGNX have no search engine. WSB borrows Access Atlanta’s search—and that’s where the only results came from: Access Atlanta has no problems with the "Freaknik" name, it seems.
Arf! Determined! Dependable!
Monday, March 8th, 1999
Threat of a storm sends panicked Georgians to grocery stores to stock up on…wait for it…bread and milk. Wanted murderer here, child molester there. Yes, I’m watching Fox 5’s News at 10. You know, the one with that cluttered, bricky-techy background and where the talent names are tossed in letter by letter from the right side of the screen. (Why? Because we can.) Yeah, Fox 5. The one that’s currently running a promo that throws every conceivable dictionary word ("Urgent, Innovative, Intense, Serious…" ) at the screen in 30 seconds to see what sticks to their newscast—and nothing does.
After that meaningless promo barrage, I check WAGA’s website to see if they’ve got the same pointlessness there. But type carefully if you’re trying to find it…http://www.fox5.com/ will take you to some people trying to sell (possibly illegal) cable TV converters. The real Fox 5 site is www.wagatv.com. That might be hard to remember because the folks at Fox-owned WAGA have done everything they can to make you forget the proud WAGA call letters. They want to establish "Fox 5" as the single, unified brand that you turn to for news, endless episodes of the Simpsons, and people who throw chairs at each other on talkshows. Problem is when you have something like the 50th anniversary of a station, those pesky four letters are bound to come up every now and again.
The Fox 5 site reports that the station signed on the air in April 1949, but that was contradicted by a report last week on Fox 5’s News at 10 that, indeed, the station turned 50 exactly this past Monday. I’ll go with that because I trust Doug Richards’ credibility over the anonymous fingers behind their somewhat stale web pages.
Richards’ "Closer Look" did a decent job of flashing back through the images of a bygone station. We saw the terrier named WAGA that served as the station’s mascot in the early days (hmm…maybe stations need mascots again) and we beheld a bunch of white guys in bad 60s and 70s garb reporting on the steps of the statehouse. We saw former WAGA GM Paul Raymon admit he dressed up as a cowboy TV host named Pecos Paul (but he uttered nary a word about presenting two decades worth of really bad editorials.) We beheld Lester Maddox and Hosea Williams and (if you watched very carefully) Guy Sharpe and Richard Belcher and Forrest Sawyer and some of the other people who moved on from WAGA while the getting was good. I didn’t catch images of long-time WAGA anchor success Brenda Wood, or Chuck Moore, or Ken Watts.
In fact, I was just settling in and enjoying the nostalgic hit when the report was over—no more time to look back, we’ve got news to report! And what news was that? I’m not kidding: A dog (not a terrier) comes to the rescue of an overwhelmed pig! That story coming up on Fox 5 News! And stay tuned for the Battle of the Broken Hearts on Jerry Springer—right after the news.
There’s no mistaking that television has changed, right? Happy birthday, terrier station.
The way TV was meant to be
Sunday, February 21st, 1999
When people notice that our television doesn’t connect to a cable in the wall or a dish on the roof but to a set of good old rabbit ears, I get up on my high horse and say "around here, we get television the way God intended, out of the air." They, of course, look at me as if I’m nuts, and say "don’t you want to watch CNN? The History Channel? MTV?" Well, I travel a lot and am in places with cable enough that I get more than my fill of Comedy Central and E! and Ultra-Headline News and ESPN-whatever and VH-1000. I’m fine, thanks. Couldn’t eat another bite.
What I don’t say is that I’m not very impressed with what Media One has to offer our neighborhood, and until they install fiber on our street and sell high-speed internet access along with countless channels of home shopping, I’d rather watch TV the way it’s "supposed" to work, ghosts and all. Actually, it’s not supposed to have many ghosts, but in an urban area filled with lots of shiny buildings that reflect radio-frequency energy, that’s what you get. So, for us, if we set up to get WSB and WXIA well, WAGA and WTBS suck. We get used to watching multiple Greg Madduxes (Madduxi?) on the mound. Sometimes, watching Monica Kaufman is less painful if she’s accompanied by her ghostly twins.
Yeah, I know, I’m rationalizing. The ugly truth is that television in and of itself doesn’t work that well (you heard it here first) , and people with any source of income at all (including some friends with huge piles of debt and zero disposable income) put cable on their necessity list, right up there with water and electricity. "I work hard," they say, "and this I do for me." It’s only when you start looking at the service with an anti-monopolistic, Consumer Reports-y eye that it doesn’t seem as if you’re getting that much for your dollar. How much was basic cable when the service first came to Atlanta in the early 80s? $7.95 a month. How much are you paying now?
And for those of you patiently waiting for digital television, I’m afraid I have another paragraph of pessimism to pass on. The good news is that ghosts will be a thing of the past. The bad news is, like so many things digital, your picture will either be perfect—or nonexistent. Early reports of folks trying to get their new-definition pictures out of the air (the way…oh, never mind) say that you’ve got to aim your fancy digital antenna right at the transmitter you’re trying to receive, or you’re screwed. Some cities have all their TV transmitters on one central high-place (the World Trade Center, for example.) Here, we’ve got to point at the Carter Center (roughly) for WSB, Briarcliff Road for Fox 5 and WATL, and…well, you get the idea. And plans for cable systems to transmit the digital signals are still in the very, very sketchy stages.
Kinda makes you want to rent a movie and forget about the whole thing, right?
Buffy at the Beeb
Friday, February 12th, 1999
LONDON—In my early days of public broadcasting, when I would push the buttons that brought today’s episode of Sesame Street to a close and roll Misterogers Neighborhood, I learned our traditions flowed from the motherlode, WGBH in Boston, and, beyond that, from the grandmotherlode, the noble BBC in Britain. It is through this bloodline that we get seemingly endless serialized Brit drama poured into an envelope called Masterpiece Theatre, and it is why if you watch the credits carefully, many episodes of Nova are, in fact, repackaged versions of the BBC’s Horizon. The Antiques Road Show wouldn’t be coming to a Cobb Galleria near you if it wasn’t for its even more turgid British predecessor, and without Monty Python’s Flying Circus there would be absolutely none of the humor that is on TV today.
Well, maybe not that last part.
It is true that even some legendary US commercial television shows—All in the Family and Three’s Company, for example, were remakes of British successes. But it’s amazing how now the pop culture pipeline flows both ways.
Among the top-rated shows in British broadcast and satellite viewing these days: The Simpsons, Friends, and ER. Up-and-coming: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate: SG1, and South Park. Ricki Lake does quite well, too, go figure. Most overused catchphrase in the UK written press of late: "D’oh!"
In fact, American programming of the style and quality (ahem) of South Park is the successful ammunition that the other television channels have against the monopolistic BBC, which, for the first time in its existence, is seeing audience shares dip below 30%. There are only a handful of broadcast competitors squeezed onto a total of three non-BBC channels. But add to that Fox via direct broadcast satellite, which in the UK goes by the name Sky—pure Rupert Murdoch, right down to the success they’ve had with Wildest Police Videos 2, and yes, some competition is happening here, thanks to Homer and his Yank pals.
So it’s amazing that the BBC continues on, in its quirky yet gigantic way, funded by the license fees levied on every television set in England. Yes, take a deep breath and consider that next time the pledge-begging Alicia Ames makes you want to kickbox your TV. It’s kind of like paying for cable, except the picture isn’t that good, and you still need an antenna. Worse, they take that money and make television by the most expensive means necessary. When the BBC goes shopping at equipment conventions, they buy the Eddie Bauer versions of cameras and tape machines, with the leather seats, the fog lights, and matching luggage. If a crew of 3 is needed, they have a dozen.
It’s the same complaint I have with religious broadcasters: if you’re spending the quarters tossed into the plate by poverty-line grandmothers, do you really need the Cadillac of cameras?
Ah, don’t get me started. Suffice to say: the BBC’s nobility and tradition rides on the backs of working class Britons who just want a little noise on in the living room after their shift.
So they may be turning to a little Buffy with their supper.
Nose job and a double room, please.
Friday, February 5th, 1999
LONDON—When I was in journalism school (and yes, I have to admit I actually went to school to be able to write these words for you), I imagined the thrill of filing a story from an exotic byline.
And, well, now I have. Gosh, it is a kick to bat words into my trusty Powerbook from the land that ice machines have still largely forgotten. The United Kingdom, where the Internet, the Simpsons, Buffy, and most other components of our pop culture survive, albeit in a strange other-side-of-the-road alternate universe.
And it’s from England’s newsstands that we get the inspiration for a new generation of "men’s lifestyle magazines," rightly skewered in a recent Newsweek. Publications like Maxim and their followers are (yes, it’s possible) even more focused on breasts and beer in their euroincarnations. The newest of these critters here: Boys Toys, which has a woman sprawled on the hood of a car, surrounded by (as I squint at the cover on the newsstand from a distance), the bold words "Sex," "Get Rich Quick," and "Win a Porsche." If you see these words above the fold on next week’s Atlanta Press, you’ll know why.
On their way to American shores is a similar horde of women’s lowest-common-denominator pubs (or their clones) that make Cosmo seem like TV Guide. Take a twentysomething gal’s magazine called…uh, Minx that screams "Be a sex goddess (first turn to page 28)" next to its Jewel-clone cover model. She sits alongside a headline that says "Nose job and a double room please," for a piece about those oh-so-popular cosmetic surgery/vacation holiday combo packages. Also inside: how to be happy—stop wearing black, buy a furby, get married, and take drugs. Oh, don’t thank me for this advice—thank Minx.
Maybe it’s just truth in advertising—yet another of these glossies (I was too numbed at this point to note the name) heralds "It’s OK to Be a Slut." Say it loud.
And memo to the AJC’s feature department: every Tuesday, the London Daily Mirror now gives women Zone—a section that is not "girly, but sexy, in your face and modern." Mirror editor Tina Weaver, speaking to Britian’s Press Gazette, minces no words. "It’s not going to be a giggly, how-to-pull-a-fella type…it is quite sexually explicit and we will cover every aspect of sex unblushingly." The launch issue had orgasms, lesbianism, bisexualitym and an imaginary diarist that out Bridget Jones-es the original exponentially.
Just imagine the ladies at Mary Mac’s tea room opening their afternoon AJC and finding that kind of garden of earthly delights!
No, I understand that editors have to do what they can to sell copies, but it is from the British tradition that we get an editor prattling on (and they all do, especially here) about the noble importance of their work and their indispensability to their target demographic—while ordering up new ways to feature sex—both the actual word and absolutely any variation on the idea—for their next cover. That duality, popularized perhaps in the States by Hugh "read it for the articles" Hefner, definitely has deep roots planted in the Old World.
Pam charges the camera
Sunday, January 31st, 1999
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who noticed that WAGA…er, Fox 5 was eating everyone’s lunch when it came to the Falcons march to the Super Bowl. The slumbering promo machines at WXIA and WSB came to life, claiming that no, they were your station for the Atlanta Falcons. They had the inside dope, the reporters players trust, and saturation coverage that would annoy even the dirtiest of early 1960s Ford compact cars. (Hey, my Dad drove a 1964 Falcon; consider that reference a brief tribute to him.)
But that’s the problem with promos, and the challenge for all promo people, be they television, radio, or print. Deep down beneath all that hype there has to be the slightest germ of truth…a tiny nugget of veracity that the rest of the wretched excess can hang on, and when it isn’t there, it’s easy for the viewer to take one look and say "Naaah," and hit the remote.
You can have Pam Martin come charging at the camera from across the newsroom at full tilt, but when all she has to say is "live, local, latebreaking, that’s Channel 2 Action News," she has just delivered a completely content-free fastball that went sizzling toward my head—leaving nothing in its wake. Back to your desk, Pam…live, local, sheesh. Channel 2 needs to have an emergency operation and have at least two of its dozen or so slogans surgically removed.
And then there are those spots for a certain large Atlanta daily that show us how people who want it all can do it all—they just have to cook up recipes from the paper while reading the business section about where their boss should build their next project (the actress points to Gwinnett county and says something like "This is a real growth area." Really? Alert the media!) and, oh, by the way, check your horoscope to find the mate of your dreams. The nugget of reality may have been in this commercial at one time, but it left in disgust.
And so do we, switching the channel.
"Hi folks, we’re here for another two hours…"
Look, you can have Tom Park and the lovely whoever-she-is in their winter overcoats making as if the Atlanta Toyota spot they’re slamming your way is happening right now, live from the car lot, but when you turn the TV on in Florida and see the same duo pulling the same hustle for Toyota of Orlando (and how many other dealerships?) the whole "we only have two left" thing seems a little lame.
It’s back to that germ of truth, and you might laugh, but it can be found in the most pathetic places. The guy on the Wolfman Furniture spots really is just about that much fun to be around; his on-camera awkwardness is that tiny tidbit of real that lets you work with the rest of the contrivance.
Yes, I am saying I’m more likely to buy furniture from the Wolfman than a car from Tom Park.
Just not very likely in either case.
What’s the frequency of eeee-vil?
Saturday, January 23rd, 1999
During the first season of the incredibly bad Nightman (seen Saturday nights and every so often at 2 in the morning on channel 46) they had a weekly recapitulation where a lab-coated man of science explained to saxaphonist/crimefighter Johnny Domino why he was hearing these voices in his head, "and Doc, they’re all bad voices." Veteran Avengers actor Patrick MacNee gave it all he had. That lightning strike caused Domino’s head to become something like a cosmic radio, he explained in deepest profundity to the baffled piece of beefcake before him. "And Johnny, you’re tuned to the frequency…of evil."
Eeeee-ville. It always sounds…well, evil-er, with a British accent.
They’ve taken that explanation off the open in this show’s second season, possibly to avoid royalty payments to MacNee, and deprived me of just one more of my guilty pleasures. Edward J. Wood may be dead, but the tradition of really bad filmmaking continues in syndication, a land where all the dialog is just about that bad, all the world looks like Canada or Mexico, and all the implants are way below average.
Forget the first-tier productions like (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Baywatch or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. No, they have a budget. I’m talking about The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Air America, Acapulco H.E.A.T., Pensacola: Wings of Gold, Highlander: The Raven, and their ilk.
Oh yeah, and that Pamela Anderson Lee one.
And that Viper thing, and Psi Factor: Tales of the Paranormal….and did I mention Earth: Final Conflict?
You’ll find them lurking in and around movies on weekends, on late at night Saturday and Sunday, on plain old broadcast televison for the most part—I won’t even get into their cable cousins Silk Stalkings and the like here. Maybe it’s just that frequent ingestions of these broadcast empty calories reassure me that whatever I do in television is somehow nobler. Maybe it’s just because I like seeing familiar places in Vancouver and Toronto masquerading as the south (this, of course, was part of the fun of The X-Files before they moved south to help David Duchovny’s marriage. Who knew that North Georgia looked just like the Pacific Northwest?)
Naah, it’s just the overwhelming implausibility of it all. The superhero/crimefighter/saxaphonist and his police lieutenant babe-friend. A crack group of Canadian-accented US government investigators, led by Max Headroom, working out of a series of mobile trailers (much larger inside than out) with a deadpan narration by Dan Ackroyd at the beginning of each hour. A dead (you heard me) musician/motorcyclist/crimefighter, and his police lieutenant buddy. An immortal (oh, that’s better) babe/thief-turned-crimefighter, and her ex-police lieutenant buddy. Mr. Barbra Streisand and his crew of top gun wannabes, greased up, hair-gelled, and ready to fight for us. A secret operations force that uses Dennis Rodman as a mission specialist (at least they didn’t say master of disguise.) A protective services agency that uses Pamela Anderson Lee as their front (make up your own joke here.) A top secret force of babe operatives, led by Lorenzo Lamas, based in a nonexistent country where…oh, forget it.
It’s just plain cheese. It’s do-it-yourself Mystery Science Theater. It’s a fine way to keep Canadian theatrical unemployment to a minimum. So…enjoy all you want, they’ll make more.
There’s news, there’s information.
Monday, January 11th, 1999
There was a point when the hunk of newsprint that landed on your front door and the half-hour of transmitted pictures and sound arriving at the dinner hour were chock-full of news. This happened here. That happened there. Who did what, when. And after they told you this news (or printed it for your perusal over breakfast), they didn’t tell you again. That content ceased being news—they reported it already, so there was no need to repackage it or repurpose it. The Falcons won. Here’s the score. A murder happened last night. Here’s the who-what-where on that. Okay, done.
But somewhere in the process, a decade or two ago when clever marketers realized that what they had was not so much a service as a product, the word "news" embedded in "newscast" and "newspaper" became a more of a lie.
I hate to say it, but I peg that moment of change right around June 1, 1980, when CNN went on the air—although I could probably attach culpability to Entertainment Tonight, USA Today, and the television news consultants coming into vogue at that time.
It was about then that I began to hear the word "information" attached to "news," and my initial impression was that information was kind of a weak cousin, a non-time-specific, loose gathering of fact or spoken utterance. Compared to news, information had far fewer active ingredients. If you had news for dinner, the dog would get a nice bowl of information.
News, need I say it, carries the connotation of "new." In and of itself, it has a short shelf life. So what do "news" executives do to make it last longer? They pad it out with filler, and use the same content again and again.
Now, we hear about an event before it’s going to happen in a half-dozen different ways, then we get saturation coverage of the event itself, and then reports of that event are recycled, chopped, and pureed into a bunch of regurgitations for days after it happened. And I’m not just talking about big, long-term stories like impeachment, global conflict, and the environment. It all gets this treatment.
Just one example.
I watched WSB’s Action News Sunday Morning last Sunday, God knows why. It was, in short, a rerun of the week’s reporting on Channel 2. Not an insightful week-in-review, mind you, but an actual re-showing of the news, presented as if it might still be news to you. Falcons coverage: recycled. Health features from earlier in the week: recycled. Interminable cold weather blather: recycled. The actual amount of reporting on events that happened between 11:30 pm Saturday and noon on Sunday: 0%. And the repeat reports were so content-free to begin with that it was thin gruel indeed by the time we got it served for Sunday brunch.
Well, sure, news directors say. Nothing happens in the middle of the night on weekends. So why do we have lengthy newscasts on Saturday and Sunday mornings? A simple reason: they’re a cheaper wrapper for commercials than anything else, including kids’ cartoons and old reruns of Gilligan’s Island. It’s for the same reason that the "Sunday" paper is in fact all but completed by Friday, and is about as fresh as expired milk.
The only way this will change, of course, is if the all-holy research reveals to the execs some day that we’ve lost our taste for this stuff. Be sure to mention that you have, if someone asks…it might be news to them.
Television to milk cows by.
Monday, January 4th, 1999
I’ve come to understand that not everybody keeps my late night hours, and are therefore not as familiar as I am with the stuff that falls from the airwaves after Conan O’Brien, Bill Maher, and Tom Snyder have gone to bed. (And if you never see even those shows, clearly you get up at 6 am and are growing corn and soybeans somewhere west of Piedmont Park.)
Me, I’m just becoming lucid at 1:35 in the morning, and broadcast television at that hour is a delightful potpourri of infomercial, news rerun, and programming for the narrowest of audiences.
Take NBC’s offerings over the years. In the era when they still had Dave Letterman at 12:35, they followed it an hour later with Later with Bob Costas, an hour of simple one-on-one interviews so interesting and entertaining, they outdid Tom Snyder at his own game. Well, never one to leave a good thing alone, somewhere during Letterman’s transition to CBS and during Conan O’Brien’s shaky start as host of Late Night, NBC replaced Costas as host of Later with Greg Kinnear—a talented actor, but a lousy interviewer and at best, a Letterman impersonator in his role as talk show host. Not long after that, Kinnear’s movie career took off and O’Brien made the 12:35 show his own distinctive comedy playhouse, and Later became this weird, sad science experiment, hosted by a night-after-night succession of pathetic NBC "stars" (for example, Peri Gilpin from Frasier interviewing what’s-her-name the other woman from Frasier) doing shameless PR for the peacock network.
Worse, on Friday nights, the show once called Friday Night Videos became something called Friday Night, starring someone named Rita Sever. In this day an age there aren’t a lot of people on television who are simply untalented, but Ms. Sever is…simply untalented. Her NBC bio offers few clues why someone more annoying than anyone on network television (and I include Fran Drescher in this comparison) has been given a show of her own. It’s almost as if she was married to the head of NBC late night programming or something…what? Oh! She is married to the head of NBC late night programming.
So I guess that explains why NBC has announced that the next host of Later will be..well, her.
Bob Costas, still very much alive, is rolling in a cemetery somewhere. Tom Snyder, also not dead yet, but retiring from late night TV, is probably doing so in protest of the Sever move. And Linda Ellerbee, godmother of late night literate news programming (she co-anchored the wonderful NBC News Overnight in the early 80s) is probably just shaking her head in disgust.
So what’s a cable-free viewer to do, switch to WSB’s Jenny Jones rerun? Learn how to make Big Money Fast in real estate? Well, we latenight folks have been given a bit of a reprieve from this torture. Since after Christmas and through January, the Later timeslot is and will be filled with 16-year-old reruns of SCTV—Canada’s own latenight sketch comedy series arguably funnier and more original in its prime than anything else on the air. If you’ve never seen Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, and John Candy working together, why not stay up late—or set your VCRs, if you have cows to milk early in the morning.
Fascinating, Ms. Barbara.
Friday, December 25th, 1998
What kind of year was it? Well, don’t draw any conclusions from Barbara Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People of 1998 special. Anyone who puts a former Spice Girl and the egomaniacal director of Titanic on a ‘best of 98’ list is either desperate for bookings (what, you couldn’t get Leo?) or seriously out of touch with the vibe here at the near-end of this odd decade.
It might be me who’s out of touch—it wouldn’t be the first time—but I’m sure not hanging around people who are captivated with the latest round the world balloon attempt, or who desperately wanted one of those Furby creatures from hell for Christmas, or who will take Barbara’s word for who was really the most fascinating.
Mostly, I just shake my head. It seems as if that great big self-feeding all-consuming media machine that eats up public relations factoids and spews out hundreds of channels of news and news-like substances day in and day out is..well, just about exhausted. Or maybe just wheezing.
Here’s your darn story on the crush of holiday travel, they seem to say, flopping it up for our perusal on the fake mahogany news desk, offering us a tired old flounder that’s beginning to stink just a little.
Can you picture anyone at home saying “Honey, look! They’re saying the airport will be busy during the holidays. Who’d have thought? We better take precautions! Oh, they’re offering ‘more details!’ Bullet points! Get me a piece of notepaper!”
We got your insightful political analysis, served up as if fresh by Tim Russert: “Look—here’s James Carville and Mary Matalin—let me dust them off a bit—wonder what they’re going to say about all this?” Oh I don’t know, Tim, might it be anything new?
And you want heartwarming, we got heartwarming news. Our top story on Christmas day—Jews fill in for Christians on their jobs! We’ve got team coverage on this breaking heartwarmingness. In other news—it’s cold! People’s cars are stalling out, especially up north! And the cold is messing up—you guessed it—holiday travel!
Part of the sense of exhaustion comes from Repetitive Promo Fatigue (RPF), which it what happens when any human is battered with nonstop hype and tease. How many ways can they say “the latest on the mess in Washington, tonight at 11”? How many times can they slam “breaking news” in our face with a “Ka-thwummmm!” sound before we don’t instinctively jerk our heads toward the screen? “Something god-awful happened. We’ll tell you not now, but tonight at 11.”
But maybe the biggest part of it is that behind the promos is a fatigue in presentation. Darn near every television presenter seems to have that look of “boy, have I done this before.”
I keep waiting for the retro to kick in. One anchor in a loud sports jacket reads the headlines—all of them, national, international, state, and metro—off the AP wire into a huge silver microphone in front of a white-acoustic-tile background, with the sounds of long-dead teletypes clacking in the background—for a total of 15 minutes, that’s it. Big horn-rimmed glasses. Crew cut. It could be John or Monica, take your pick.
News, in black-and-white.
Everyone loves summing up.
Saturday, December 12th, 1998
I wish I knew exactly what powerful generic encoding compels journalists to sum up the year past in December. We’ve got "the best of" lists. We have countdowns (Steve Craig on 99X :"Ooh, everyone loves countdowns!"—yes, he was kidding.) We’ve got men, women, and gerbils of the year. Bests, top tens, years in review—there just seems to be an overwhelming chronological imperative: "Sum up! Sum up!"
Let me let you in on a small secret: December is just another month. And 1998 was just another year. The next two years, alleged dramatic crossings of the millennial boundary, will be generic gatherings of a dozen months, just like this one; maybe rainier than the last, maybe with more hurricanes, maybe not. We won’t, three years from now, suddenly soar into orbit on the Pan Am Shuttle, dressed in 60s mod in 70s earth tones, listening to Strauss, chatting into picturephones. Our planet will continue to get warmer or cooler, depending on who you believe, and more and more viewers will defect from the three networks to Fox, cable, and what-have-you-per-view. Your car will not become electrified, or develop the ability to hover. Cable will not be priced at what it’s worth.
Hey, now that’s clear in everyone’s minds, let’s look back over the past twelve months, and discern some method in the madness that is the media in Atlanta. I think the first distinction I would draw from this past year’s emissions (spoken, printed, broadcast, and so on) would be that this really wasn’t the year for cataclysmic upheaval. We didn’t have dramatic anchor shifts from one station to another (OK, Ken Watts. Yeah, that’s big), and big heads didn’t roll at the Journal-Constitution.
Morning radio, cutting edge bad boys and girls all, seemed almost institutionalized, with Barnes, Leslie, and Jimmy (for example) cranking out shows that were, well, fine (which is my father-in-law’s way of saying "really not that good, but, whatever.") Gary McKee played the nostalgia card as long as he could at Z-93 (he’s leaving quietly.) Departed 96 Rock morning man Christopher Rude resurfaced…as their afternoon man. Fine, fine. Neal Boortz plumbed new depths of obnoxiousness on the AM band (especially when the subject turned to Clinton/Lewinsky), attracting inexplicable numbers of listeners who just plain hate him. Both Boortz and the Morning Xers have "Best of" CDs out—why anyone beyond their immediate families would want to hear these performances again and again is beyond my ability to explain.
Local television threw itself in to the coverage of the 98 elections, but most of the sound and the fury came from the staggeringly ugly negative ads in between the news segments. WXIA and WPBA came up with the great idea of pooling their coverage efforts, first during the primary (hmm, NBC and PBS did the same thing in 96), and did well enough that WSB and GPTV copied their efforts during November’s election night. WSB led the charge exposing Ralph David Abernathy’s problems above and beyond merely a drug-sniffing dog at the airport, and WAGA submerged their call letters behind the way-too-trendy "Fox 5" moniker; their Doug Richards continues to stand out as the best feature reporter in this market. And did I mention that audiences for local news—everywhere—continue to dwindle?
And then there’s daily newsprint. Which, as you know, in this town, is the one and only (and I mean only) AJC. I admittedly have had a problem with this paper since they lost Bill Kovach a decade or so ago, and throughout 1998, they’ve seem to have settled into a bipolar embrace of the two extremes of modern journalism. For every adroitly-written Ann Hardie look at governmental success and excess we have to wade past unreadable factoid-filled blurbettes that pass for news coverage. For every cogent essay by Cynthia Tucker we must endure endless amounts of cut-and-paste Peach Buzz. We’re forced to find the content in and around their Vent. So I’m closing one eye—and squinting—and, like living with a schizophrenic, I’ll celebrate the good that the AJC does, in and around that uh…other stuff.
So, squinting, grimacing, crossing my fingers, and gulping black coffee, I’m looking forward to another arbitrary 12 months’o’media. We’re in for a fine time.
You heard it here first.
Saturday, December 5th, 1998
So, just what is a scoop? What’s an exclusive? What does it mean to score a beat on your fellow reporters?
As with so many things, the answer is a lot more ambiguous these days. When the news broke that Tom Hanks that he might be reconsidering his stalwart support of President Clinton, we found out first not by reading the New Yorker one-on-one with Hanks, but by hearing broadcast reports saying "In an upcoming New Yorker interview, Tom Hanks says…"
The New Yorker had the story "first," but we heard about it first on television because, like many other weeklies, the magazine lets TV, radio, and daily print reporters get an early look at their edition—sometimes several days before it hits newsstands.
Why? Because the print publication hopes that getting word out fast builds good word of mouth. And when the magazine (as most do) has a circulation far below the level of national broadcast audiences, they reach significantly beyond their actual readership by letting the more immediate media report on their "scoop."
For me, reporting on reporting is only barely a step above regurgitating a press release from any company. It’s not investigating. It’s not gathering (heck, the information is often force-fed to you). There’s no attempt at context. It’s promoing.
And it gets particularly bizarre when the report on the report becomes…uh, the report.
In the Hanks case, the affable actor was able to get a denial out—claiming that the New Yorker piece distorted what he was saying—before subscribers plucked their copies of the magazine from mailboxes to read the interview in question. His statement came in response to the report on the report. In a certain sense, the hoorah was over before it began.
This kind of reporting-on-reporting-as-promotion has become a refined art, especially in the practiced hands of someone like Barbara Walters. Whenever she scores a big "get"—like the recent exclusive (ooh!) interview with Ken Starr, you can count on seeing her a day or two before on Entertainment Tonight offering juicy tidbits from her ABC exclusive—which, I guess, is then just a bit less exclusive.
ET has always done a big business in all manner of pseudo-exclusives, hustling 10 second clips of movies, music videos, even hairstyle changes up before our eyes. Ooh, it’s a hair flip you’ll see first and exclusively on ET!
Of course, any "exclusive" on Entertainment Tonight doesn’t seem quite as dramatic after ET runs the video five or six times promoting the story before they get to telling the story.
And when television isn’t immediate enough, there’s now of course the even more instant (and transitory) medium of the Internet. Print reporters, especially those at dailies, regard this as something of a great equalizer, because they can file half-sourced, incompletely-researched stories as or more quickly than their broadcast counterparts. It’s part of that acceleration syndrome I keep whining about, where the only thing that gets sacrificed in the whirl of information and the dizzying spin of the news cycles is thoughtfulness, carefulness, and perspective.
And who has time for those qualities these days, anyway?
Mundane@ajc.com.
Friday, November 27th, 1998
Every time I look at (that’s look at, not buy) a copy of the Sunday Journal-Constitution—a massive bundle of ads wrapped in and around a minuscule news hole, I think of the hilltops I’ve seen in the Pacific Northwest, stripped of trees. Stripped for…what? Twelve pages of department store ads? For lame coupons? For the thoughts of Jim Wooten?
To tell you the truth, even with all the romance I’ve always had for newspapers—these days, the thought of that much forest being consumed to crank out something so overblown and obsolete as the average daily paper makes me sick.
Yes, I do know that newsprint makes for a convenient package (gee, not unlike the one you’re holding now), and try as they might, our pioneers of technology haven’t quite made the breakthroughs yet that will make digital paper a reality—but call me an optimistic techno-dude: it’ll happen some day. We will have the clarity and immediacy of internet news with the convenience and ease of use that ink on dried, flattened wood pulp has offered since Gutenberg’s day.
But somewhere between now and then, the Journal-Constitution has to do something to beef up its web site ajc.com, which is really a page that zaps you to www.accessatlanta.com/ajc. That redirection happens because the AJC’s web site (and WSB’s and the rest of the Cox empire) are under the aegis of Cox Interactive Media, and I must say that they don’t do a bad job with creating a generally useable package here and in several other cities.
But my beef is that the content they’re working with, in the case of the AJC, is rather thin indeed. Instead of giving us most, if not all of the printed paper’s news (like the dotcom versions of the Washington Post and the New York Times), we get an online mutant thing that has selected stories from the paper, and a hard-to-find page (it’s ‘news@tlanta’, if you’re lost) containing news summaries, only a few of which link to longer versions of the story. As if to make up for that, they include bizarre features like ‘Vixana’ and an ‘alt.frontpage’ that are mercifully left out of the print edition. The former is apparently a gabby twentysomething partier-about-town who sprinkles phrases like n’est-ce-pas every paragraph or two to impress someone in her immediate family. Recently she wrote about attending one of the recent functions for—you guessed it—Tom Wolfe. Perhaps these confections are designed to capture a younger demographic than the print paper, just as an increasing number of papers create hipper versions of their home editions for sale on the street. Feel targeted?
The rest of the site is taken up with instant polls, news-you-can-use filler, a bunch of ads, and a more than a few annoying animated GIFs.
I’m not saying junk the whole thing—just pump up the content—fire up that mighty repurposing engine, so I don’t have to kill any more trees to keep up with what’s happening in our town. It’s such a delight to be able to connect to great reporting from places as far-flung as New York, Washington, San Jose, London, and Toronto each and every day. I’d like to make ajc.com a worthwhile part of my morning surf, too.
All Wolfe, all the time.
Friday, November 13th, 1998
Hey, check it out. There’s a web page that tracks the movements of Tom Wolfe through Atlanta—up to the second, complete with a Java applet that flashes a little guy-with-a-white-suit icon in the precise neighborhood where…oh, I’m just kidding. Let’s all take a deep breath.
Sure, the pop journalist turned pop author wrote an Atlanta white pages-size story largely set in Our Fair City, and yeah, in predictable fashion, greater metro Buckhead’s movers and shakers were alternately swooning over and repulsed by the strength of Mr.Wolfe’s attentions. One could have forecast as well the Godzilla-level promotional blitz—aided and abetted by the all-too-available author who plopped down in talk show chairs from PBS to CBS in support of his latest movie—er, novel.
But even I’m stunned by the meta nature of this particular frenzy, where we seem to be talking about the event of the book’s arrival, not the work itself. (And yes, that’s just what I’m doing here.) “It’s really big!,” we’re breathlessly informed. “It took 320 million years to write,” we are led to believe. Even normally sober NPR anchor Robert Siegel presented Wolfe with the results of his math homework: “By my calculations, the title of the book appears one-tenth the size of your name on the cover.”
With Virginia-gentlemanly good humor and something resembling detached bemusement, Wolfe seems to egg it all on. He patiently spun the same anecdotes for Charlie Rose that he dropped in his Time cover story—which was worth watching if only to see how Rose would work in the fact of his ex-marriage to Mitchell-house-saviour Mary Rose Taylor. (Answer: rather clumsily.) And Wolfe told any interviewer within earshot about how at first he led the novel astray, setting it in New York. Finally, yes, we know—after a visit or two here—and to the south Georgia estates of Atlantans with more money than sense—he was convinced that the path to his true Zen Dickensian opus was right down Peachtree.
So when Wolfe’s and Atlanta’s paths again crossed over the last few days, we’ve been treated to the spectacle of a daily “Tom Wolfe Watch” in the Journal-Constitution that, while it didn’t take note of which specific public washrooms he favored while in town, came darn close. I’m closing my eyes now and trying to imagine an editor committing limited newsprint and newsroom resources to this kind of tripe. I’m trying to imagine a reporter being ordered to summarize everything—everything Wolfe does, mumbles, dines on, and regurgitates within a four area code region. I’m trying, really.
Maybe as a public service, I should summarize the genuine world news the JourCon shoved out of the way for this hoo-hah. A volcano is getting serious in Mexico…two earthquakes hit China…intense winds battered the Pacific Northwest…what? You don’t care? You prefer to know who got to touch the hem of his really white garment at the tony History Center party? You’d like to know, really, was he making fun of our town, or..uh..what?
Ah, well. You know where to go for that.
Showdown with..never mind.
Friday, November 13th, 1998
There’s a poster-size chart in the halls of CNN’s Atlanta headquarters that tells the story of that network’s amazing strength—and weakness. It’s a graph of ratings and audience over the past decade or so—and when—and only when—the nation or world is in crisis, when a plane has gone down or something in the Mideast has blown up—CNN’s audience soars.
No surprise. And it’s no surprise, then, that CNN’s crew was in place and ready last weekend to cover the parry and thrust of the latest confrontation between Iraq and the rest of the world.
They made it look easy, the same way that the Braves can, on a good day. Put Wolf Blitzer in the White House, Christiane Amanpour in Baghdad, post correspondents at the Pentagon, the UN, and a generic anchor or two at CNN Center in Atlanta, and switch back and forth, covering challenge and counterchallenge, verbal strike and counterstrike. A statement is made at the White House, and seemingly moments later, the Iraqi official response arrives in Ms. Amanpour’s voice.
"Let’s go to the UN." "Now, let’s switch to the Pentagon." "Now, back to the White House." "Let’s ask…no, we’re switching to the UN, where Nizar Hamdoon is speaking live." This is global village electronic diplomacy at its best, where officials of state argue and negotiate simultaneously through back channels and through the most public front channel there is. They watch (as we do) as actions and reactions accumulate and boil over. This political brinksmanship on a global scale is observed, moderated, and filtered through a control room in Atlanta. Switch, switch, switch. The CNN correspondents are arguably experts at their beats, and when there’s a story to tell, the producers in Atlanta wisely sit back and let them tell the story. The anchor need do little more than take us live from one point on the globe to another, with mercifully little "happy talk," almost no contrived questioning of the field correspondents by the folks back home.
And well into CNN’s second decade, we take this package for granted: the preproduced "Showdown with Iraq" graphics, complete with ominous music.. A dependable stable of political and military experts. Okay, they’ve even fired up the annoying Larry King in "serious mode." They’ve got the routine down.
When CNN’s on a story like this, it can be compelling television. And the rest of the time? I think everyone—including Ted Turner—expected CNN to be able to cover all the world’s news in depth when there isn’t one overwhelming story. But when there’s no crisis to be found, the channel’s coverage is mostly paper-thin, repetitive—almost as if they’re in standby, waiting for the fire alarm to ring again.
Why? It seems that when CNN tries to tell bigger documentary-size stories, audiences—and interest in general—don’t seem to be there. It could be that the channel is a precision tool that can do just one thing—extremely well. Maybe they’ve determined there’s no way to make the other stories compelling. Maybe, during a quiet moment between crises, they should listen to a little of NPR’s All Things Considered, and reconsider.
Not as easy as ABC.
Friday, November 6th, 1998
No, the audio engineer on ABC Nightline’s election night wasn’t drunk, and the technical trouble during Monday Night Football or Live with Regis and Kathie Lee last week wasn’t in your set. The folks from ABC just let some overwhelmed guy from sales sit at an enormous audio board and send deafening feedback into the earpieces of Rahm Emanuel, Orrin Hatch, and Ted Koppel.
After a one day strike on the first day of November sweeps by NABET—the union representing some 2,200 ABC technicians— Disney/ABC decided to lock out the NABET technicians who would normally be getting the job done. Why? Because they want their union to, among other things, give them 72 hours notice—14 days notice before broadcasts with live remotes—before staging any other strikes. In the meantime, what we get from ABC is technically wobbly coverage, guest cancellations (Vice President Gore, Adam Sandler, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Bennett, and others refused to cross the picket lines), and situations where a technically hobbled ABC can’t cover the news others can.
The one-day strike was actually called over a new health care plan ABC wanted the union—which has been operating without a contract since March 1997—to accept. NABET has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board calling the lockout illegal. Legal or not, ABC must be confident enough to try and push this under these conditions during a ratings period.
The reality is that management at Disney/ABC (and at the other media empires) as well as NABET and other have some adapting to do in the face of new technology, new definitions of news, and the changing face of employment, where more and more work will be farmed out to "independent contractors" who aren’t paid benefits.
* * * * *
ABC’s promofolk seem to be trying one intriguing science experiment during sweeps. During the unwatchable "Mission Impossible" movie last Thursday, the bright-yellow-and-black net ran sixty-second promos that, in todays accelerated age, felt like small programs in and of themselves. (Sixty seconds, for those of you too caffeinated to do the math, is one minute.) In one, Barbara Walters took her time and told us about several upcoming 20/20 segments (explaining to us patiently that 20/20 was on Sunday, Wednesday, Friday, but not Thursday), and in another, we were treated to an extended summary of how NYPD Blue will attempt to grab us by our lapels (followed by some extended heartsleeve-tugging) with the drawn-out departure of Jimmy Smits as detective Bobby Simone.
A promo that long very much has the feel of a theatrical trailer, and is about as far from the ‘blipverts’ we’ve been assaulted by as you can get.
* * * * *
And in a final word in an all-ABC column, I’m compelled to call your attention to Politically Incorrect, snapped up from Comedy Central by ABC a while back. Bill Maher’s little salon of counterchat, which exists to juxtapose wrestlers with politicians retains its edge in an era where, well, wrestlers have become politicians. Highly recommended.
