Local TV

She had to have had the most brilliant smile I’d ever seen or she was a tribute to extensive, and very expensive, orthodontia. That smile was overwhelming and you knew that it was designed to make you feel better about everyday things like bankruptcy, divorce or a death in the family.

As an anchor for a Miami-based TV station, she would, at 11: PM, tell you of people’s inhumanity to people, the dramatic, the political, the grisly (redundancy intended,) the bizarre or sometimes even, the newsworthy. She was of the “leave ‘em happy school” of contemporary TV “journalists.” You know the kind. They shuffle papers after reading the news, make small talk (very small) which is designed to make the audience think they are just plain folks making $200,000 per year on their reporting skills. They are not expected to report the news, they are expected to read it to you.

Anyway, she was the epitome of the every-hair-in-place school of broadcast journalism. She had that enormous, perpetual, mandatory smile. She was a woman probably in her late twenties, and being on camera was her raison d’être.

She was the result of the demise of genuine newsgathering and the rise of crime, grime and slime exploitation. Oddly enough, I may have been there at its inception. In the early sixties I was working for WABC TV News in New York City, when the station’s management decided to go tabloid. The street reporters were to use “We’ve just been told exclusively” in every other sentence while “reporting” some piece of absolute innuendo, trivia, rumor, contrived and concocted crap which purported to be news. The only thing they didn’t have grace enough to do when reporting this trash and rumor, was give the audience a broad wink in the middle of the “report.” Several years later I was a street reporter for both WCBS TV and WNBC TV in the city, but tried to tell it straight. It was that old newspaper training. If it was a feature piece it was told that way. I looked down, and still do, on the “cuties” who would do damn near anything to get their faces on camera and to stay on camera.

Anyway, let’s get back to our Miami anchorwoman. One night, smile firmly in place, I noticed that she seemed to have several subtle colors surrounding her eyes. Later, when meeting in person, I realized she used three shades of eye shadow. Her smile was more brilliant than ever and the whole studio was made the richer for it. They could have turned off the klieg lights and she would have illuminated the set.

Without any slippage in that desperate smile, she paused and got to the next item: A story about a car accident in which an entire family was wiped out, and it was a good- sized family. Her twinkle never diminished and her smile was absolutely radiant as she read the ages of the children in the crash. She didn’t read the copy, she beamed it into a quarter million homes as if her super-white teeth could erase any feelings of sorrow and shock.

Her Co-host looked momentarily taken aback when the camera picked him up. Perhaps he had worked on a newspaper for a week or two. He picked up the narrative on the next story.

The camera shifted back to her and she smiled her way through a story about wild fires and other happy events and made the appropriate amount of insipid, contrived, air- headed talk which passed for humor at the end of the show. She had obviously enjoyed the night’s offering.

If you compare most local newscasts with network news programs, excluding the Fox “network,” you are struck with an enormous contradiction. The overwhelming majority of these network correspondents report it straight and if they have a good feature piece, it leaves you musing about the human condition. They don’t gush or exaggerate, and believe me, the competition among network correspondents is every bit as real as among their local brethren.

But they are pros, intelligent and reasoning people, who are reviewed by their peers back in the network headquarters. There are controls. It would be interesting to note how much review most local news stories get. Don’t get me wrong, the local producers are also smart people, but they deal in the sensational and the “If it bleeds it leads” mentality which permeates most local stations.

In my neck of the woods, Ch. 4, the NBC affiliate, tries for a higher level because their boss is a network pro. It always shows. When the American people can honestly be told about corruption, news-worthiness or decency of an event, they can usually figure it out for themselves, unless their prejudice runs so deep they find their angst bolstered by what they watch.

Beating this to death? No, because what we watch in our homes, that which purports to be what is really happening in our world, that which Cronkite summed up with, “That’s the way it is,” is what we are, and how we respond to our world. Many years ago a radio nutritionist used to say, “You are what you eat.” `Well I believe you are also what you watch and think. “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts,” as Sgt. Joe Friday used to say. Don’t you get sick of being spoon-fed crap?