TV - Is TV News More About Ratings And Money Than Bettering The World In Which We Live?

"Images can either imprison or liberate us." -Roberto Assagioli

Tonight I saw a panel of White House correspondents talking about what it was like to cover the White House. They ask questions of administration officials because there are always questions to ask, then write their story and go on camera (if they're a TV reporter) and report what that official said. The last question an audience member asked the panel was, "Sure you ask questions, but what else are you doing to see if there's more to the story than you're being told? It's your job to inform us, your viewers, if there is."

After years of covering county, city, and state government in Texas (and those were the days we asked elected officials tough questions and we didn't let them off the hook -- the questions were only the beginning of the research we did to tell our viewers what their government was doing with their tax dollars), I began a 9 year career with a TV station that allowed me to do over 2,000 feature stories about unique people, off-the-beaten path places, and it is the feature story which I came to love doing so much that I want to say we need more of, not less, in our daily news broadcast. These were stories of people who would never be seen on a TV news broadcast except that my photographer and I decided to do a story about them.

Why are feature stories vanishing from TV news broadcasts? The public speaker, television feature reporter, and movie maker are storytellers. While there is an underlying structure to what the person in each venue does, a structure the audience is often unaware of, there seems to be a trend these days away from content (a central focus) and a movement toward the shock value of an experience--what is said, what is heard, what is seen.

The adrenalin response becomes, in this context, more important than the cognitive ability to process (think about) what one is experiencing.

An example of this is the "shock quotient" sought by many local and national television newscasts which is resulting, more and more, in the disappearance of feature stories that uplift the viewing audience. These "feel-good" about-your-community stories are vanishing from TV news broadcasts and being replaced with news stories directed at target audiences that Orlando Sentinel syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker says are "culturally locked in perpetual adolescence."

Shock value is in. If the story bleeds, it's likely to lead, be the top story in that evening's newscast.

Having created over 2,000 feature stories over a nine year period during my tenure at a CBS-TV affiliate in Texas, I know the importance of preserving the broadcast tradition of telling the stories of local unsung heroes, innovators, and visionaries -- material routinely overlooked by the "ratings hungry" TV news outlets.

For nine years, my photographer and I traveled Texas looking daily for interesting stories about people who were making a difference in the lives of others.

These were not the lead stories at 6 & 10 -- slots reserved for the dramatic "hard hitting" news stories you might call,"Why are you living in this community, it's so scary?"

Still, to the credit of my news director who felt my stories were important and fought to keep them on-the-air, my positive, upbeat storytelling played an important part in our station's offerings and ratings success.

My phone rang often with a viewer telling me, "I rush home to see your stories every day." I received hundreds of letters with messages such as, "I've lived here all my life. I had no idea what you showed us today even existed." These viewers appreciated being told they lived in a community with good people around them who were making tangible contributions.

Sensationalism dominates newscasts nowadays. For example, TV news operations are in the business of looking for ratings grabbers: fires, wrecks, and crime scenes -- anything that will jump out at the viewers at the top of a newscast. "People say they want more positive stories, but when we tried that we lost viewers (which translates into lost advertising revenue) to our competitors," a TV news director friend mentioned to me recently.