What I found was that the happy-talk approach that emerged in the '70s has not entirely gone away, rearing its dippy head in moments of forced banter between the anchors ("He's a fighter in't 'e?" asks Denver anchor Mark Koebrich after a story about the rehabilitation of a high-school football coach hit by a truck). Given the context, the effect is almost always grotesque. "See? There is some good news," Natalie Jacobson, the anchor at Boston's WCVB, assures her viewers after a story about a state trooper delivering a baby on the highway. Then, following a brief mention of Bill Clinton's "60 Minutes" interview, Jacobson says, "Also ahead, the deadline draws closer to the threatened execution of Paul Johnson." So much for good news.

But happy talk has to share space now with what can only be called the Ted Baxter approach. The anchors affect a furrowed brow; those who are able to do so add the flourish of a slightly raised eyebrow. Nodding -- precise inclinations of the noggin used to punctuate sentences and convey to the viewer that this is serious stuff -- is crucial to this style of reporting. And everyone's voice assumes a stentorian tone, a tone of voice that gives a fire or car accident or a murder exactly the same weight as a potential terrorist attack. It's the opposite of the soporific NPR tone, but the effect is much the same: to assure us that everything exists on the same level and that nothing really matters. Given that sort of equivalency, the following lead, from anchor Kaity Tong of New York's WPIX (the WB 11), makes perfect sense: "More medical news now: One of the Olsen twins is dealing tonight with a very serious eating disorder."

If Ted Baxter is in front of the camera, meanwhile, it's beginning to look more and more as if Jerry Bruckheimer is behind it. Location shooting is often done by Steadicams that aim to convey a vertiginous urgency to every story. (WNYW, the Fox affiliate in New York City, uses that camera style inside the studio.) And in the studios, the copious displays of computer graphics are no longer just hovering over the anchor's shoulders but interrupting the stories themselves. On WHDH in Boston, a breaking story is introduced by a "whooooshhh" sound effect and the graphic "THIS STORY NEW AT 11." Did anyone expect it to be old?.

But we've become so used to this flow of cliché and sensationalism and stone-faced idiocy that it's easy to let newscasts wash over us. Start paying attention to what the anchors and reporters are saying and you'll find local TV news has little use for words anymore -- at least as tools used to convey specific information.

Local TV news can make you wonder if the basic model for journalism is still the five W's and the one H. Story after story is introduced with the equivalent of the jacket copy used to sell books. On Boston's CBS affiliate, anchor Paula Ebben gives a hepatitis scare at a local fast-food restaurant a horror-movie spin: "They went out for ice cream or maybe a hot-fudge sundae, but tonight thousands of people in Arlington are on edge because of a serious health scare." The affiliate seems to have a penchant for this type of reporting. Reporter Beth Germano begins her account of a teen's drowning in a quarry with, "The lure of a warm night may have proved irresistible for a Methuen teenager and his friends." (She later tops herself with a line about how the boy "couldn't hold on in the cold, murky water of the quarry.") And anchors Lisa Hughes and Joe Shortsleeve pay homage to the hackneyed in this intro to the story about a teenager's disappearance 27 years earlier:

Hughes: "A young girl's disappearance has haunted a police officer for 27 years."

Shortsleeve: "Tonight there's new hope that a local pond may hold the clues to this mystery."

Another example of triteness in the face of death: Jim Watkins of New York's WPIX begins a report on a shooting with, "The family of a 15-year-old girl from Florida is grieving tonight because she will not be returning home."

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