Local News
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Local News
March 10, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up the awful truth about local TV news -- we like it awful -- and we learn how to make an anchor float.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Welcome back to On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. The February Sweeps have ended, and with them the rankest putrescence in the already fetid swamp known as local TV news. In the journalistic, academic and public broadcasting communities the state of local news is regarded as a sorry one indeed. Mike Pesca, On the Media's producer at large, has these observations.
MIKE PESCA: If it bleeds, it leads.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: A jumbo jet bursts into flame shortly after takeoff; at least 70 people are killed. Good evening--
MIKE PESCA: Live shots during a hurricane. Hidden cameras. Salad bar sting operations. Happy talk.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: I had to give up my nap today so I could [LAUGHTER] hand out candy to the kid-- trick or treaters!
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. They started early today! It's so nice outside. [LAUGHTER] [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, they did!
MIKE PESCA: Infrared motel room microbes. Deadly children's toys.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: And the Psycho-Saw-- [SAWING SOUND] get this one -- was one of the items cited by the Consumer....
MIKE PESCA: A report on public toilets you won't want to miss! And tortured segues to the weatherman that make the Jerry Lewis Telethon seem as if scripted by Shakespeare by himself.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: Sixty dollars to pay the fine; another thirty dollars for a late fee -- the question is whether we should fine Steve Baskerville-- [LAUGHTER] for what is going to happen this weekend.
MIKE PESCA: Local news is the disease. Is the Columbia School of Journalism the cure?! [APPLAUSE]
WOMAN: Welcome to all of you and to our discussion about local television news -- that's really going to be our focus for the next hour or....
MIKE PESCA: To be fair, people within the media have been fighting the good fight against hype, chit-chat and luridness for years. To be unfair, their feebleness just might shock you. Legions of academics and committees of concerned journalists including an outfit called the Committee of Concerned Journalists would like to bring back to TV news the values embodied in men like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. You know, Murrow, whose Person to Person pioneered the celebrity chat show; Cronkite who once lit up a cigarette on the air and said "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." That sentiment, commercialism and Grammer could never exist on TV today, but what does exist is a viewing public which, according to Deborah Potter, finds local news--
DEBORAH POTTER: Boring. It's predictable, and many of them think it's largely irrelevant!
MIKE PESCA: Potter is the executive director of Newslab, a non-profit organization that works with local TV stations. Her conversations with news viewers played well with the Columbia crowd, yet they're not backed up by evidence. A recent study by the Pew Center for People in the Press shows that 80 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with TV news. Local news ranked behind only CNN as the most believed form of news across all media.
WOMAN: Cause there's people you see and you know the - what's going on in your community, you trust it.
MIKE PESCA: Chicago's Midway Airport was full of fans of local news. People from Washington, Milwaukee and Orlando sounded less like the audience according to researchers and more like the audience according to stations trying to give the people what they want.
WOMAN: Channel 8 especially is not giving much fluff; they're really down to the point. They give you the facts, and then st-- try and stay friendly. That was a good thing -- they're a very friendly station.
WOMAN: Oh, I don't know. Maybe we're just used to the people that are on it-- and they seem to give you all the news.
WOMAN: People are looking for their local news to just kind of give them the bullet points of what's going on -- short, sweet - here's your information. People don't have a lot of time.
MAN: I think hammering home-- time after time about violence and-- the macabre side of life really sets a poor tone when in reality there are many better things going on within - in our communities that can be focused on--
MIKE PESCA: Even that last man said his complaint was true only of the stations he didn't watch. He liked Tampa's WTSP because--:
MAN: I think it's fair and it's balanced in its reporting, in its style.
MIKE PESCA: That's the kind of endorsement a local TV station would kill for, and then they'd probably lead with the murder. For a time, Chicago was the epicenter of the argument over local news. About a year ago CBS owned WBBM -brought in Carol Marine to anchor a serious newcast. Her attempt to reverse the sizzle-to-steak ratio caught the attention of such programs as On the Media and The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
MAN: WBBM recently introduced an innovative new broadcast that is radical in its simplicity. It emphasizes news -- not gimmicks -- news!
MIKE PESCA: News dragged WBBM's already moribund ratings into the sub-basement. The plug was quickly pulled.
TIM JONES: Ponderous. Not enough movement. Not enough excitement. Not enough graphics. Basically kind of dull and, and has been said by several people it was, it was PBS on CBS.
MIKE PESCA: Tim Jones is the media writer for the Chicago Tribune. He and everyone who still believes in quality local news are quick to point out that Marine's demise shouldn't dissuade other TV stations from trying. But if you're a news director who wants to go high brow, before you knock on the skeptical station boss's door, you'd better be prepared to answer for the Marine experiment, and what do you say to that? Maybe something like--:
CARL GOTTLIEB: Quality in local television sells, and by sells I mean gets ratings, and we don't necessarily think winning in the ratings is a bad thing.
MIKE PESCA: Carl Gottlieb is the deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He heads up their local news project which annually records two weeks of newscasts at dozens of stations. The tapes are watched by experts who assign points for things like local relevance, balance and sourcing. The newscasts are eventually given an overall letter grade. When the grades came out, Boston's WBZ proudly proclaimed themselves the top-ranked news in town. [FAST-PACED MUSIC]
WOMAN: When news breaks, it's not just that we get there fast; we take the time to check the facts -- to tell you the full story.
MAN: Integrity counts. When it comes to breaking news, we're fast. And--
MIKE PESCA: What WBZ neglected to say that their grade was only a C. Only six stations out of 49 earned A's. What's more, according to Gottlieb, the A's of today might not have been at the head of the class ten years ago.
CARL GOTTLIEB: This is based on a curve. These are the best of what's out there, but I will say, after looking at, at a lot of these myself -- maybe too many -- there's some pretty good broadcasts out there!
MIKE PESCA: The Project's thousands of research hours yielded the conclusion that quality begets ratings. The reaction? It was derided and then ignored. This is in an industry desperately throwing money at consultants for a tenth of a ratings point bump. The Project's findings weren't persuasive, because they consist of arguable analyses hinged on subjective surveys. Local news directors don't want that. The get minute by minute Nielsen breakdowns that show them the exact points when viewers tune in and out. They know who's getting high ratings and what they're doing to get them. Why should they trust letter grades? They'd rather put their faith in the powers of a man like Joel Cheatwood. In Miami, Cheatwood made his name by using flashy crime coverage to build WSVN into the town's dominant station. In Boston he brought WHDH out of the basement. In Chicago he made Jerry Springer a commentator -- which caused Carol Marine to quit the first time! By the time she left again, Cheatwood was the man in charge of all CBS stations. Journalism's standard bearers like Carl Gottlieb may bestow the letter grades. Network bosses like Joel Cheatwood deliver the ratings. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Joel Cheatwood is vice president of news for all CBS stations. Mr. Cheatwood, is there a difference between what people say they want and what they really want?
JOEL CHEATWOOD: I think to some degree, sure. You know it's when you look at research about news content and see that everybody wanted to see stories on the environment and on education and yet station after station would program to that end and nobody would watch!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well Mr. Cheatwood you, you've caused the ratings to soar at station after station, and you've done it in ways at various times that may very well have been misconstrued and, and certainly criticized, but it's worked! So what have you done that's worked?
JOEL CHEATWOOD: Well let's take-- let's take Boston, for example. It was clear that really the, the market had kind of been on auto pilot. We went in and really determined that an aggressive news approach where we really covered major stories wherever they took place, as long as they had a New England connection, we would travel, we would cover them. The O.J. Simpson trial was going on. We felt it had high interest. We weren't comfortable with just having our network provide us with coverage. We had a reporter there for two months! We identified that there was a real need for health reporting in the market, and consumer investigative reporting, and really those three elements, I think, helped the station rise to, to where it is today!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:You gave them more O.J. -- you gave them more health coverage -- and you gave them more consumer coverage. It sounds like there's a certain amount of carrot and stick happening there.
JOEL CHEATWOOD: No, I, I don't think there is, but I also think that there are ways to present those stories -- and most people would look at and say that's not a TV story. I will tend to put a touch to things or a spin to things that make them aesthetically more attractive to watch.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The Project for Excellence in Journalism came out with a massive study -- thousands of hours spent watching local newscasts, and in a nutshell, it said that quality news begets higher ratings. Did this survey cause any ripples within the stations?
JOEL CHEATWOOD: You know I, I don't always agree with the criteria that goes into the sorts of ratings systems like that one, but I do think that it's important because it provokes question and discussion. We need to take a hard look at crime reporting. We can't just use the old standard of - you know - if a siren is blasting or a red light is flashing, we're going to put a camera to it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If it bleeds, it leads. Is it true?
JOEL CHEATWOOD:You know I - I'll tell you - moreso than ever, it's not true. The best thing that local television news does is, is provide up to the minute coverage of breaking news stories. But what's happened is we've kind of become the one-trick pony. We do it well; we provide it; people respond to it, so we, we've overdosed on it. People have said look - enough is enough. You know the shtick doesn't really work for us any more. It's old hat. So give us some substance.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Isn't if it bleeds, it leads the way that you made your name?
JOEL CHEATWOOD:I think when that criticism was attached it was in Miami. It was a time in, in that city's makeup where crime was the number one concern among the citizenry. You know when I am asked to defend my, myself I always point out that during the time at that station, we increased the level of investigative reporting, education reporting and health reporting to a greater extent than anyone had ever done. But again, we had, we chose to present it in a - a flashier style I think overall than, than local television had been accustomed to. So people gravitated to the glitzier elements of the presentation. The critics forgot about the substance that was there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Is there a siege mentality out there among the stations that of course J schools and media pundits are going to criticize them and those people just don't understand the bottom line!
JOEL CHEATWOOD: There is a certain sense of idealism when it comes to this business. This is a business. We do have - we are accountable to budgets. We're accountable to profit-making companies. You know the days of news divisions being loss leaders -- they're over.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Joel Cheatwood is vice president of news for all CBS stations.
March 10, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up the awful truth about local TV news -- we like it awful -- and we learn how to make an anchor float.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media from National Public Radio.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Welcome back to On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. The February Sweeps have ended, and with them the rankest putrescence in the already fetid swamp known as local TV news. In the journalistic, academic and public broadcasting communities the state of local news is regarded as a sorry one indeed. Mike Pesca, On the Media's producer at large, has these observations.
MIKE PESCA: If it bleeds, it leads.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: A jumbo jet bursts into flame shortly after takeoff; at least 70 people are killed. Good evening--
MIKE PESCA: Live shots during a hurricane. Hidden cameras. Salad bar sting operations. Happy talk.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: I had to give up my nap today so I could [LAUGHTER] hand out candy to the kid-- trick or treaters!
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah. They started early today! It's so nice outside. [LAUGHTER] [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, they did!
MIKE PESCA: Infrared motel room microbes. Deadly children's toys.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: And the Psycho-Saw-- [SAWING SOUND] get this one -- was one of the items cited by the Consumer....
MIKE PESCA: A report on public toilets you won't want to miss! And tortured segues to the weatherman that make the Jerry Lewis Telethon seem as if scripted by Shakespeare by himself.
ON-AIR CORRESPONDENT: Sixty dollars to pay the fine; another thirty dollars for a late fee -- the question is whether we should fine Steve Baskerville-- [LAUGHTER] for what is going to happen this weekend.
MIKE PESCA: Local news is the disease. Is the Columbia School of Journalism the cure?! [APPLAUSE]
WOMAN: Welcome to all of you and to our discussion about local television news -- that's really going to be our focus for the next hour or....
MIKE PESCA: To be fair, people within the media have been fighting the good fight against hype, chit-chat and luridness for years. To be unfair, their feebleness just might shock you. Legions of academics and committees of concerned journalists including an outfit called the Committee of Concerned Journalists would like to bring back to TV news the values embodied in men like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. You know, Murrow, whose Person to Person pioneered the celebrity chat show; Cronkite who once lit up a cigarette on the air and said "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." That sentiment, commercialism and Grammer could never exist on TV today, but what does exist is a viewing public which, according to Deborah Potter, finds local news--
DEBORAH POTTER: Boring. It's predictable, and many of them think it's largely irrelevant!
MIKE PESCA: Potter is the executive director of Newslab, a non-profit organization that works with local TV stations. Her conversations with news viewers played well with the Columbia crowd, yet they're not backed up by evidence. A recent study by the Pew Center for People in the Press shows that 80 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with TV news. Local news ranked behind only CNN as the most believed form of news across all media.
WOMAN: Cause there's people you see and you know the - what's going on in your community, you trust it.
MIKE PESCA: Chicago's Midway Airport was full of fans of local news. People from Washington, Milwaukee and Orlando sounded less like the audience according to researchers and more like the audience according to stations trying to give the people what they want.
WOMAN: Channel 8 especially is not giving much fluff; they're really down to the point. They give you the facts, and then st-- try and stay friendly. That was a good thing -- they're a very friendly station.
WOMAN: Oh, I don't know. Maybe we're just used to the people that are on it-- and they seem to give you all the news.
WOMAN: People are looking for their local news to just kind of give them the bullet points of what's going on -- short, sweet - here's your information. People don't have a lot of time.
MAN: I think hammering home-- time after time about violence and-- the macabre side of life really sets a poor tone when in reality there are many better things going on within - in our communities that can be focused on--
MIKE PESCA: Even that last man said his complaint was true only of the stations he didn't watch. He liked Tampa's WTSP because--:
MAN: I think it's fair and it's balanced in its reporting, in its style.
MIKE PESCA: That's the kind of endorsement a local TV station would kill for, and then they'd probably lead with the murder. For a time, Chicago was the epicenter of the argument over local news. About a year ago CBS owned WBBM -brought in Carol Marine to anchor a serious newcast. Her attempt to reverse the sizzle-to-steak ratio caught the attention of such programs as On the Media and The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
MAN: WBBM recently introduced an innovative new broadcast that is radical in its simplicity. It emphasizes news -- not gimmicks -- news!
MIKE PESCA: News dragged WBBM's already moribund ratings into the sub-basement. The plug was quickly pulled.
TIM JONES: Ponderous. Not enough movement. Not enough excitement. Not enough graphics. Basically kind of dull and, and has been said by several people it was, it was PBS on CBS.
MIKE PESCA: Tim Jones is the media writer for the Chicago Tribune. He and everyone who still believes in quality local news are quick to point out that Marine's demise shouldn't dissuade other TV stations from trying. But if you're a news director who wants to go high brow, before you knock on the skeptical station boss's door, you'd better be prepared to answer for the Marine experiment, and what do you say to that? Maybe something like--:
CARL GOTTLIEB: Quality in local television sells, and by sells I mean gets ratings, and we don't necessarily think winning in the ratings is a bad thing.
MIKE PESCA: Carl Gottlieb is the deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He heads up their local news project which annually records two weeks of newscasts at dozens of stations. The tapes are watched by experts who assign points for things like local relevance, balance and sourcing. The newscasts are eventually given an overall letter grade. When the grades came out, Boston's WBZ proudly proclaimed themselves the top-ranked news in town. [FAST-PACED MUSIC]
WOMAN: When news breaks, it's not just that we get there fast; we take the time to check the facts -- to tell you the full story.
MAN: Integrity counts. When it comes to breaking news, we're fast. And--
MIKE PESCA: What WBZ neglected to say that their grade was only a C. Only six stations out of 49 earned A's. What's more, according to Gottlieb, the A's of today might not have been at the head of the class ten years ago.
CARL GOTTLIEB: This is based on a curve. These are the best of what's out there, but I will say, after looking at, at a lot of these myself -- maybe too many -- there's some pretty good broadcasts out there!
MIKE PESCA: The Project's thousands of research hours yielded the conclusion that quality begets ratings. The reaction? It was derided and then ignored. This is in an industry desperately throwing money at consultants for a tenth of a ratings point bump. The Project's findings weren't persuasive, because they consist of arguable analyses hinged on subjective surveys. Local news directors don't want that. The get minute by minute Nielsen breakdowns that show them the exact points when viewers tune in and out. They know who's getting high ratings and what they're doing to get them. Why should they trust letter grades? They'd rather put their faith in the powers of a man like Joel Cheatwood. In Miami, Cheatwood made his name by using flashy crime coverage to build WSVN into the town's dominant station. In Boston he brought WHDH out of the basement. In Chicago he made Jerry Springer a commentator -- which caused Carol Marine to quit the first time! By the time she left again, Cheatwood was the man in charge of all CBS stations. Journalism's standard bearers like Carl Gottlieb may bestow the letter grades. Network bosses like Joel Cheatwood deliver the ratings. For On the Media, I'm Mike Pesca.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Joel Cheatwood is vice president of news for all CBS stations. Mr. Cheatwood, is there a difference between what people say they want and what they really want?
JOEL CHEATWOOD: I think to some degree, sure. You know it's when you look at research about news content and see that everybody wanted to see stories on the environment and on education and yet station after station would program to that end and nobody would watch!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well Mr. Cheatwood you, you've caused the ratings to soar at station after station, and you've done it in ways at various times that may very well have been misconstrued and, and certainly criticized, but it's worked! So what have you done that's worked?
JOEL CHEATWOOD: Well let's take-- let's take Boston, for example. It was clear that really the, the market had kind of been on auto pilot. We went in and really determined that an aggressive news approach where we really covered major stories wherever they took place, as long as they had a New England connection, we would travel, we would cover them. The O.J. Simpson trial was going on. We felt it had high interest. We weren't comfortable with just having our network provide us with coverage. We had a reporter there for two months! We identified that there was a real need for health reporting in the market, and consumer investigative reporting, and really those three elements, I think, helped the station rise to, to where it is today!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:You gave them more O.J. -- you gave them more health coverage -- and you gave them more consumer coverage. It sounds like there's a certain amount of carrot and stick happening there.
JOEL CHEATWOOD: No, I, I don't think there is, but I also think that there are ways to present those stories -- and most people would look at and say that's not a TV story. I will tend to put a touch to things or a spin to things that make them aesthetically more attractive to watch.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The Project for Excellence in Journalism came out with a massive study -- thousands of hours spent watching local newscasts, and in a nutshell, it said that quality news begets higher ratings. Did this survey cause any ripples within the stations?
JOEL CHEATWOOD: You know I, I don't always agree with the criteria that goes into the sorts of ratings systems like that one, but I do think that it's important because it provokes question and discussion. We need to take a hard look at crime reporting. We can't just use the old standard of - you know - if a siren is blasting or a red light is flashing, we're going to put a camera to it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If it bleeds, it leads. Is it true?
JOEL CHEATWOOD:You know I - I'll tell you - moreso than ever, it's not true. The best thing that local television news does is, is provide up to the minute coverage of breaking news stories. But what's happened is we've kind of become the one-trick pony. We do it well; we provide it; people respond to it, so we, we've overdosed on it. People have said look - enough is enough. You know the shtick doesn't really work for us any more. It's old hat. So give us some substance.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Isn't if it bleeds, it leads the way that you made your name?
JOEL CHEATWOOD:I think when that criticism was attached it was in Miami. It was a time in, in that city's makeup where crime was the number one concern among the citizenry. You know when I am asked to defend my, myself I always point out that during the time at that station, we increased the level of investigative reporting, education reporting and health reporting to a greater extent than anyone had ever done. But again, we had, we chose to present it in a - a flashier style I think overall than, than local television had been accustomed to. So people gravitated to the glitzier elements of the presentation. The critics forgot about the substance that was there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Is there a siege mentality out there among the stations that of course J schools and media pundits are going to criticize them and those people just don't understand the bottom line!
JOEL CHEATWOOD: There is a certain sense of idealism when it comes to this business. This is a business. We do have - we are accountable to budgets. We're accountable to profit-making companies. You know the days of news divisions being loss leaders -- they're over.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Joel Cheatwood is vice president of news for all CBS stations.
Produced by WNYC Studios