Please stand still while I point my hat at you

(I am pleased to deliver more prophecy from the mcarp archives…)

Tips from the I-Team toolbox.

A producer in my newsroom was working on one of those ‘evergreen’ investigative pieces (i.e., one of those stories whose shocking secrets you can stick in a file folder, ready and waiting to be ‘discovered’ for the next ratings period).

But, there was a problem.

The subject matter was a ‘sting’ of disreputable auto mechanics. The premise: find an older, high-mileage car, have it repaired to certifiably perfect running order by a master mechanic, then take it to other mechanics to see if they find anything ‘wrong’ with it.

The producer had followed the game plan, and sure enough, one of the mechanics she’d targeted told her the ‘perfect’ car had a leaking head gasket. But a telltale smear of oil down the side of the engine block proved that in fact, the gasket was leaking; our ‘master mechanic’ had missed it.

“No problem,” the producer reasoned, as her investigative piece started to disintegrate before her eyes. “I’ll have Frank write and voice it. He’ll know what to do.”

“How will that fix it?” I asked.

“You know,” she replied. “He can make it sound more investigative: ‘We discovered…’, ‘Our investigation revealed…’ — that sort of stuff.”

“In other words,” I said, “to make this guy look guilty, even though he’s honest.”

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed in that case, and the story died in its sleep.

Somebody said all reporting is investigative. I disagree. In television, next to no reporting is investigative. Especially the stuff billed as investigative. Generally speaking, investigative reporting on local news is general assignment reporting with a few extra buzzwords and ominous pauses in the delivery.

For example:

“Our investigation revealed that these convenience store snacks are made mostly (ominous investigative pause)… of sugar.”

“We took our hidden camera into this daycare center, and discovered that every afternoon, the staff makes the children take naps (OIP)… on floor mats.“

Which brings us to the subject of hidden cameras. One station for which I worked sent a crew to cover a hockey game. While they were there, they shot pictures of underage teenagers buying beer at the concession stand. It was being done in plain sight, and they got plenty of footage.

But it didn’t look ‘investigative’.

So, the station sent a photographer to a subsequent hockey game with a hidden camera, wedged in his hat, to obtain dramatic, grainy, secret footage of the fluorescent lights overhanging the concession stand, plus the occasional few frames of a teen buying beer.

The camera, not the teens or the beer, had become the focal point of the story.

What was the point? The point was that the grainy, unsteady look of the hidden camera video suggests, rightly or wrongly, something bad is going on, and that something msyterious and James Bond-like is being done to uncover it.

Most investigative coverage can be pretty much summed up in the tease: “Coming up… we get the goods on a local businessman who doesn’t buy TV advertising.”

It somehow became conventional wisdom that investigative reporting must be, by definition, prosecutorial in nature. I think early episodes of 60 Minutes, with Mike Wallace and Dan Rather chasing bad guys across the parking lot, microphone in hand, left us with that belief.

But what if there isn’t a bad guy?

In the real world, issues don’t always have a clear-cut hero and villain. Sometimes — most times — everyone is a little bit right and a little bit wrong.

But you rarely see investigative reporting that doesn’t have comic book-like delineations between good and evil. And because the I-Team goes in with the intent that it is going to portray someone as ‘the bad guy’, stations tend to focus their efforts on people who aren’t likely to fight back. Advertisers and people with good lawyers get a pass.

I think the reason so much investigative reporting focuses on sex offenders (other than the obvious advantage of being able to put the word SEX in huge letters in a promo) is because sex offenders are a safe and easy target. No convicted sex offender is going to complain about being exploited for ratings. (And the fact TV news is notoriously unwilling to investigate, for example, used car salesmen is a pretty good indicator of how far down the scale it’s got to go before it feels safe getting the goods on someone.)

“Sex offenders could be living in your neighborhood!” Really. Given that we don’t do island penal colonies anymore, I’d say that was pretty much a given. There were more homicides and armed robberies in my neighborhood than sex offenses last year, but no reporter is digging up the names of all the convicted robbers and killers living around me.

When was the last time you saw an investigative report exploring better ways to deal with sex offenders, as opposed to a wide-eyed investigative reporter waving the printout of registered sex offenders at the camera?

Easy enough to report that they’re there; we already know that. How about some solutions?

There are obviously laudable exceptions to the rule. The Firestone tire story, broken by a TV station in Houston, proves it. There’s no question more Americans would have died had a local TV news reporter not tied together the string of apparently unconnected fatalities and lawsuits stemming from faulty tires.

And Firestone is a big company, with big lawyers. The auto maker most affected, Ford, is a major television advertiser.

It’s no wonder all those other stations are trying to claim credit for the story by claiming they were on first with weather video of some guy changing a flat tire along the Interstate.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)