Posts tagged news
What the Hell kind of Apocalypse was this, anyway?
Mar 19th
The weirdest people in Waco were not the ones at the top of the hill.
(More from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)
Greetings from Satellite City, TX
What do they call those noisemakers Tibetan monks swing around their heads… the ones that make that hroowwwwnnngggggg hrooowwwnnngggggg noise?
We all have our unanswered questions about Waco… and that’s mine.
I have nothing to say about black helicopters, or the second amendment, or whether David Koresh was a kook or a prophet. I have nothing to say about how it ended. I wasn’t there, as it turned out, on the final day.
But one evening in late March, 1993, stuck in Waco, and stuck for a way to advance the Branch Davidian standoff story for my own station, I picked up the Gideon Bible out of my room at the Days Inn, and took it with me down to Satellite City, the media encampment at the perimeter of the standoff.
I sat in a Chevy Astro van with that Bible in one hand, and a Pearl longneck in the other, and, with the van’s dome light for illumination, began reading the Book of the Revelation — specifically, the passages about the Seven Seals which were so crucial to the Davidians’ understanding of their leader, David Koresh.
“And when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals I saw it, and I heard one of the four living creatures say, as if in a voice of thunder, ‘Come.’”
Up on the hill, the Davidians’ Mt. Carmel compound stood illuminated against the night sky. An FBI helicopter swooped overhead, sailing down the hillside, sweeping the fields with a spotlight.
“And when the Lamb broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, ‘Come.’ And another horse came out — a fiery-red one; and power was given to its rider to take peace from the earth, and to cause men to kill one another; and a great sword was given to him.”
Across the road, a television news crew from Houston had turned their satellite truck into a landbound party barge, complete with barbecue, lanterns, and boom box. Gloria Estefan sang from the stereo.
Meanwhile, from the hilltop, the occasional rumbling of tanks, and the sound effects of the FBI’s ‘psychological warfare’ campaign drifted down to mingle with the dance music and constant chugging of satellite truck generators.
“When the Lamb broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, ‘Come.’ I looked, and a black horse appeared, its rider carrying a balance in his hand.”
In fact, crews who had been parked at Satellite City more than a month had turned it into a ‘home away from home’. The media pool had searched for tents that could serve as temporary shelter, and had come up with a row of candy-striped county fair pavilions, that were lined up along the side of the road. Talk about your media circus.
Lines in the sand
CNN crews had surrounded its installation with a foot-high picket fence, and had stuck a pink flamingo lawn ornament in the ground outside its trailer door.
There were other reporters who found so many amenities of resort living available in Satellite City, they never left the place. You’d see them following around other, working reporters who’d come in from town, trying to beg, borrow, or steal snippets of information. Or, they’d sit in their own trailers and watch Charles Jaco’s CNN reports, and plagiarize that material for the folks back home.
It occurred to me that night — with beer in one hand and Bible in the other — that, as surreal as this scene looked from my vantage point, it must look even stranger from the bullet-riddled house on the hill. Inside, the followers of David Koresh had convinced themselves the world was coming to an end. For them, in fact, it was.
“When the Lamb broke the fourth seal I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come.’ I looked and a pale-colored horse appeared. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades came close behind him; and authority was given to them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword or with famine or pestilence or by means of the wild beasts of the earth.”
There they were, surrounded, on a hilltop in rural Texas, by helicopters and tanks and spotlights and loudspeakers blasting the hroowwwwnnngggggg hrooowwwnnngggggg of Tibetan soundmakers — whatever they’re called.
“When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw at the foot of the altar the souls of those whose lives had been sacrificed because of the word of God and of the testimony which they had given.”
But what, amidst the tanks and helicopters and bizarre sound effects and bodies that surrounded them, did they make of that little camp down at the foot of the hill? The row of brightly-lit satellite trucks and festival tents, and the strains of Miami Sound Machine faintly drifting up the hill?
What the hell kind of apocalypse was this, anyway?
Nobody at the foot of the hill seemed to care.
“When the Lamb broke the sixth seal I looked, and there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as dark as sackcloth, and the whole disc of the moon became like blood.”
Crossing the line, never to return
Unable to focus on Revelation, I walked across the road to the Houston satellite truck. Someone noticed I seemed a little distracted. He asked why, and I told him. “Who cares?” he replied, pausing to swallow a mouthful of barbecue. “They’re all nuts up there, anyway.”
“When the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for about half an hour. Then I saw the seven angels who are in the presence of God, and seven trumpets were given to them.”
On that spring evening in 1993, the axis of my reality shifted just a little bit. Nothing looked quite the same for years afterward. And TV news never looked the same again.
My Audience, My Enemy
Mar 15th
(Another classic from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)
The ordinary viewer is just so… ordinary.
“You know what your problem is?” My news director was putting the question to me — not in an accusatory or critical tone, but with the demeanor of a doctor telling his patient he has a terminal illness. “You have no style and no class.”
That was actually part of an employee evaluation I was given. (And here’s a bit of free career advice: if, during your first evaluation, you’re given an assessment like that, don’t think things will get better if you just hang around another 17 years.)
When I was recruited for my first TV news job, just five years earlier, I had gone to work in a newsroom full of people from working class families just like mine. Some were liberal and some were conservative, some Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish.
But no one was there with the sense that the circumstances of their birth, or the fact that they were on TV, entitled them to some special place in the social order.
But five years later, Ronald Reagan was president, and the Ewings of Dallas were America’s TV family. And the term “working class,” at least in my profession, had become pejorative.
And although it is no longer my profession, the profession’s attitude seems the same.
Before Joe the Plumber
Have you ever heard of “Joe Sixpack?” He’s the ‘typical viewer’ for whom television news managers program their product. He is, by most accounts, an overweight, undershirt-wearing, lowlife who plops down in his ratty, squeaky, vinyl-upholstered easy chair at six pm, rips a Bud out of the plastic six-pack ring, and props his feet up for the news. Every morning, in newsrooms across the nation, executives and producers meet and talk about what Joe Sixpack will want to see on the news that evening.
Want to see a picture of him? Go look in the mirror. Because, unless you’re a doctor, lawyer, stock broker, or someone similarly situated, you are Joe Sixpack.
TV news personalities, in their need to separate those with “style and class” from those without it, have informally divided their public into two groups. The first group consists of the aforementioned doctors, lawyers, stock brokers, plus a few charismatic politicians — and, of course, TV news personalities.
The other group is ‘trailer park trash,’ consisting of everyone else.
But the grim reality for these provincial news celebrities is this: the affluent, fashionable folk with whom they want to associate, and be associated, don’t watch television news.They’re all tuned to the Discovery Channel, or Crossfire. The local TV news constituency is the very mechanics, convenience store clerks, letter carriers, plumbers, insurance salesmen, and the like whom one of my coworkers once dismissed with a single word, or rather, sound effect: “Ew.”
Dual Citizenship?
For the TV news reporter, the quandary is this: how to produce a news product for the mass of citizens who actually watch the newscast, and buy the products advertised — while simultaneously nudging the rich and trendy with a wink and a smile, as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention to that. Really, we’re just like you.”
One afternoon at an upscale shopping mall in the city where I lived, two gang members got into some kind of friendly scuffle outside the Swiss Army shop, and one of them accidentally shot the other in the butt with a small handgun.
We didn’t make any bones about it in our live coverage: the story was not that a black teenager had been shot. The story was that a lot of upscale white bystanders, whom our anchor described as being from the city’s ’select neighborhoods,’ could have been shot.
Years later, we interrupted programming to report on a shooting in a similarly exclusive mall — 250 miles away. One indignant caller demanded to know why we thought anyone in our audience cared what happened in the Dallas Galleria. One news executive shrugged and said, “Everyone I know shops there.”
You Might Be Surprised…
A pipe bomb exploded one evening in a suburban, semi-rural community east of the city. The teenager who had assembled it was seriously hurt. Our reporter on the scene — born and raised in one of those ’select neighborhoods’ — began her live report by saying, “You know, you might be surprised. There are actually some pretty nice homes out here.”
In fact, though, TV reporters generally aren’t like the affluent upper classes from whom they seek acceptance. They may have been raised in those kinds of homes, but in the competitive, cost-conscious world of modern TV news, they’re paid far less than they would be making if they’d actually become doctors, lawyers, or stock brokers.
So, they try to make up for it by just toadying and name-dropping (“Omigawd! Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a Rolex repaired in this city?”), and leveraging their tenuous status as celebrities for the chance to stand on the fringe of sophisticated society. They’d rather be the lapdog of the establishment than the watchdog.
But frankly, the glamour of exclaiming “Just take a look!” in front of a nightly procession of car wrecks, house fires, and drive-by shootings is often lost on people who have spent ten hours performing open heart surgery, or made new case law, or gotten in on the ground floor of an IPO that tripled in value in eight hours.
Life Without Apology
The guy who first tagged me with the ‘no style and no class’ criticism eventually got fired. His boss — chief enforcer of what the company described as the ‘aura of affluence’ — was escorted from the building under armed guard one day, along with most of his family, while auditors pored over the fat leaseback deals and inflated expense reports he’d written for himself at the owner’s expense. That’s how he’d gotten his ‘aura of affluence.’
I’m more than two years out of the business myself, now. I decided to go do something else for a living — something that didn’t require me to start every day by apologizing for having ‘no style and no class.’
I’m not dramatically wealthier than I was, but getting off the ‘best car/best restaurants/best neighborhoods’ merry-go-round left me financially more independent than I ever was as a reporter.
But there’s another kind of independence that’s even more valuable. That’s the freedom to be your own person, choose your own friends, form your own values, and not portray a semifictional character created by a boss, or a consultant, or your coworkers — or even by yourself — to please someone else.
Well, I Had to Kill the Kids’ Hamster
Mar 12th
(Another classic from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)
“But I gave him a fighting chance.”
- Former television news director (1978)
I never understood why anyone wanted to be a news director, anyway. Talk about a thankless job. Now, it’s gotten to where some of the big companies won’t even let their ND’s go to the RTNDA convention once a year and least pretend for a week they’re doing something besides signing their own names to consultants’ faxes.
I worked for 17 news directors over 25 years, which gives you some clue about the average job tenure of news directors. Some of them were solid leaders or solid journalists, or sometimes both. And about a fourth were people I wouldn’t have hired to mow my lawn. Of course, then again, the guy who mows my lawn doesn’t need a focus group to tell him how to do it.
One ND was an alcoholic. One was a drug addict. One was both an alcoholic and a drug addict. Another made management decisions based on ‘psychic dreams.’ And the nuttier they were, the longer they seemed to hang on. It was the rational ones, with a grasp on reality, that usually cratered most quickly.
Remains of the Day
A bunch of us were sitting one evening at a local media hangout, rehashing the day. It was the usual shop talk: two-hour drives to stories that had fallen through, items that didn’t make slot, who was in and who was out in our competitors’ newsrooms.
During a brief lull in the conversation, our news director — working on his third or fourth margarita — offered how his day had gone.
“Well, I had to kill the kids’ hamster this morning.”
The rest of the table, not surprisingly, fell silent.
“He had gotten out of his cage and chewed a hole in my fishing waders. So, he had to die.
“I gave him a fighting chance, though. I put him in the middle of the garage floor, and turned the schnauzers loose. I figured if he made it under the lawn mower, well… survival of the fittest, you know.
“But he didn’t. Too bad.”
So, our news director had amused himself before coming to work by watching his dogs tear his children’s pet to pieces.
Setting His Sights
The ratings were not being good to this guy. The network had jumped from third to first place, but our local news was still mired in third. A complete reworking of the product — new set, new name, new promos and graphics — had made no impact at all. He had brought in a new, glamorous ‘pretty boy’ anchor from another city, whom the viewers had greeted with howls of laughter.
(“We didn’t hire him just for his pretty face!” the promos announced, as an attractive young woman followed him with her eyes, licking her lips as he walked by.)
And as the ratings chugged along in the basement, his demeanor worsened.
One day, he brought a rifle to work, and propped it against his desk.
“What’s that for?” a slightly nervous employee asked.
“I cracked the stock over the weekend,” he replied. “I’m taking it by the shop after work to get it fixed.”
But the next day, the rifle was back. And the day after that. And the day after that.
Finally, as the days stretched into weeks, we just got used to seeing the gun propped up against the desk, or laid across the top, and we quit asking about it.
He ended up getting fired at the station Christmas party — which is a story in and of itself. Thank God he didn’t have the gun with him then.
While the rest of the staff was in Studio One, getting wasted on punch and margaritas after the late news had wrapped, he was going on a rampage through the station. He tore excutives’ nameplates off their office doors, and tossed them in the toilet. He ripped pictures off the walls, and smashed them over his knees. On his way out the front door, he pulled the pole lamp down in front of the terrified night receptionist, and used it to to chop down the station Christmas tree.
But you know what? As news directors go, he was one of the better ones.
I had to work for a few who were really nuts.
ABC: Always Be Cutting
Mar 11th
Network news is being outsourced, more than you knew.
Read here about how ABC News is “transforming” itself through cuts and reorganization. At least they didn’t call it “right-sizing.”
(And bear in mind that ABC News had a larger staff than NBC News and MSNBC combined…)
But how do you do the job with fewer people? You outsource.
Check out Good Morning America’s coverage of tornadoes and storms in Arkansas.
I apologize if the image isn’t clear, it’s not always easy to shoot an old-style curved television surface.
But just about everything you need to know about the future of network news is in this piece.
Particularly in the little white letters across the top.
The ones indicating the source of this interview.
Five years ago, this would have been inconceivable, that a television network would run video shot by a local newspaper.
But the key elements for this piece came from many sources outside of the ABC editorial umbrella.
So, what are your predictions for what is to come for network news?
Mount Everest is in Alaska
Mar 10th
(Another classic from the mcarp archives… the prophetic genius and brilliance are his;
the ones/zeros, pixels, pictures and subheads and pull-quotes are mine.)
“You mean it’s not in Wisconsin?”
The phone rang, and an intern picked it up. She listened for a moment, then put her hand over the receiver and looked at me.
“Where is Mount Everest?” she asked.
What am I, the World Book? “Tell ‘em it’s in Wisconsin,” I replied.
“Nuh-uhhh,” a coworker interrupted. “Mount Everest is in Colorado.”
“Mount Everest isn’t in Colorado,” a third responded. “Pike’s Peak is in Colorado. Mount Everest is in Alaska.”
The intern turned back to me. “Where is it, really?”
Then I realized I didn’t know for sure which country it was in. So, I weaseled. “It’s in the Himalayas.”
“No, it’s not,” replied the coworker who had placed it in Alaska. “The Himalayas are in New York, and I know Mount Everest isn’t in New York.”