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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Ted Knight, Chevy Chase and now Will Ferrell have all spoofed TV news. But it's their real-life counterparts who are really funny.
Jul 8, 2004 | A television news reporter is doing a story on a man who murdered both the ex-wife he was planning to remarry and her lover. Fixing the camera with a stern face and an even sterner voice, the reporter intones, "Well, the marriage is definitely over now!"
Have you stumbled across Ted Knight as the hapless Ted Baxter on a "Mary Tyler Moore Show" rerun? No, you've tuned into the WPIX "News at Ten" (the May 28, 2004, broadcast, to be specific) in New York City and heard, courtesy of reporter Vanessa Tyler, a pretty good example of what passes for journalism in local TV news these days.
Local newscasts have long been criticized for the "if it bleeds, it leads" approach and for reducing news to info bytes, though since the latter is becoming the standard in all journalistic media, it seems unfair to single out local TV news for condemnation. Most local newscasts are a predictable mix of metro news, national news recaps, consumer segments, blatant plugs for the parent network's programming, entertainment (you should pardon the expression) reporting, the sports segment and the segment that the cartoonist B. Kliban once identified by the words, "And now here's the weather with our weather asshole."
The Will Ferrell vehicle "Anchorman," opening Friday, looks as if it will be the latest in a series of potshots at a target that's become easier and easier to lampoon since Ted Knight's Ted Baxter and Chevy Chase's inaugural "Weekend Update" narcissist. But the truth is, what is really out there is often beyond parody. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's State of the News Media 2004 report, local news has lost roughly 20 percent of its audience since 1997. The Project goes on to suggest why that isn't a cause for mourning, saying, "there is too little evidence that it is committed to improvements. Indeed, most of the evidence would seem to suggest the opposite." The truth is that the real culprits are the local news outfits themselves and especially the larger corporations that, thanks to deregulation, own more of them than ever. They care most about maintaining their profit margin by keeping costs low, the final product be damned. Not to mention its viewers.
Watching a random sampling of local news broadcasts in New York, Boston and Denver from the past few weeks reveals the usual grim picture -- clichés, bad grammar, imprecision, a tin ear for the sound of language -- but also a penchant for melodrama that cheapens stories. And, at the worst, a failure to report stories accurately. I should say that there was nothing scientific about my survey, nothing that deserves to be called methodology. I simply sent out e-mails to friends in various cities asking for a random sampling of their local news. In New York, I stuck a tape in the VCR and set the timer to catch various broadcasts from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. on the same day.
