RIP: The Baron of TV News Banter

You may not have noted the death of Frank Magid earlier this month. He’s responsible for what passes for news on local TV ­— and hence your distorted perception (and that of your neighbors) of what’s going on around us.

I’ve known of Magid for years, ever since I became fascinated by the potential of broadcast news in graduate school. Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow’s producer (see “Good Night and Good Luck”), was my professor and inspired my belief in the high calling of broadcast journalism.

Murrow and Friendly, of course, famously lived up to that calling.

Not long after I graduated, Magid came along and took a wrecking ball to journalism on local TV news. As a high-paid, itinerant TV consultant, Magid was the nemesis of responsible journalism. He advised profit-fixated station owners that the news should be entertainment pandering to the lowest common denominator and the largest possible audiences ratings, ad revenues and profits.

His Dickensonian name seemed made to order for his contribution to our collective awareness.

Magid came up with the ubiquitous “Action News” format with its “happy talk” between “news teams” of affable, young “personalities.” Local broadcast news, which has always been highly competitive, became know for show not substance.

The Magid formula was, and is, heavy on fear and frivolity. The news is defined by noir accident scenes, baby giraffes and orangutans, muggers and molesters, ominous weather fronts on animated maps, goofy home videos, whiz-bang gadget reports and mindless banter between carefully-coiffed Ken-and-Barbie anchors.

Civic news about schools, government, political campaigns, taxes and the environment gets short shrift.

Audiences have been subjected to and shaped by Magid’s innovations for 35 years. In fairness, they worked. Media executives credit Magid’s recommended dramatics and phony chatter with “saving” local news — and generating massive profits.

“Action News” also made Magid, a former sociology professor, into a rich man. The New York Times obituary noted that when he died at age 78, he owned homes in Santa Barbara, Cedar Rapids and Montana.

The unhappy talk is that in departing this world, he left his largess behind.

What he left us was TV tabloid twaddle without end. Just flick through the local TV news to witness his legacy.

For the majority of the public, which, alas, still relies on television to learn about the world outside the front door, the Magid-esque perception is as pervasive as it is perverse.

Life gives us one shot at making this world a better place. Frank, you blew it.

Will on-line newspapers adopt TV news values?

I took my “Mass Media and Society” class to The Oregonian and Willamette Week last night and came away more certain than ever that newspapers are in their death throes. Sure, we heard a lot of brave words about the future, but when the editors we talked to got down to specifics you could tell the ground was shaking beneath their feet — and that they had only vague ideas about what to do about it.

Convergence to screens like the ones we are staring at means that we’ll be seeing more and more video on “newspaper” web sites. In other words, newspapers will evolve into TV news programs. More and more news decisions will be driven by the demands of video’s moving, mesmerizing images. We will have less explanation and analysis and more touching, emotive “scenes” and “moments.”

The appeal will be to feelings, not thought. To haphazard, disconnected impressions, not linear, logical reasoning.

Technology is in the driver’s seat, and I for one don’t want to go where it is taking us.

The other concern at the newspapers is that the era of presses as money-making machines is over. No lucrative replacement is anywhere in sight. The Internet produces a small fraction of the revenue print did for papers. And so the forced transition of newspapers to the internet has meant smaller staffs, smaller papers, reporting on the cheap (read, crime news) and fluff.

There is no end in sight.

As I sat in its big news conference room, I imagined the hulking Oregonian building on SW Broadway housing neat insurance companies or law offices. Out with cluttered journalists’ cubicles.

As I see it, the best we can hope for are little networks and co-operatives of quasi-independent journalists who band together to market themselves and to build reputations for accuracy, fairness and compelling writing. But even they will have to compete on, and succumb to, screen images that purport to inform.

Old newspapers (and books and magazines) will be collected like typewriters, slide rules and “film” cameras.

The last print journalism to go will be the small, so-called “niche” publications. Many of them will be (and are) little more than advertising vehicles.

Then they too will give way to portable reading devices, whose photo reproductions will match, or exceed, those of the glossiest magazine. More than that, their photos will be (and are) moving pictures. Vanity Fair, Wired and The New Yorker can never match that capability within the confines of the printed page.

Finally, as the ways we are informed rapidly evolve, we, as sentient beings, will be changed. Note that we will not choose to change. The media environment will literally change us in how we relate to each other, how we make judgments, how our children learn and come of age, how we act and react, how we form our values, how we confront the future.

The speed of the change will be measured in a handful of years, perhaps even months. What took a century before, may take, at most, a decade. (Try to remember where we were in 1998.) In a single lifetime, a person will experience four or five generations remarkably dissimilar, almost alien one to another.

And above it all will be inexorable technological change whose far-flung, independent engineers and scientists will continue to be blind to, and seemingly unconcerned about, their inventions’ consequences to humanity and the planet.

"Video press releases" trash TV news credibility

An addendum to the previous post.

Maybe the new Turnbull Center, devoted to teaching "strategic communication" and training would-be PR flacks, is onto something: PR is the new news.

On today's Oregonian Commentary page is a report about how TV stations (two of them local) are running "video press releases" without revealing that the stories are produced by self-serving, corporate PR practitioners. (Sorry I can't find the link to the Oregonian piece which is on B5 of today's paper, but I have found a version of it at Common Dreams).

The "O" commentary article by Henry Geller and Diane Farsetta lists two Portland stations, KOIN-TV and KPTV, as offenders.

Sadly, the news broadcasters' trade association, citing the First Amendment, says it's perfectly OK to keep the public in the dark about who is producing the "news".

The broadcasters need to be reminded of the quaint concept of credibility.

If the TV news industry pollutes its water, no one will drink it.