I’m an unusual sort: I’m under the age of 50 and I watch local TV newscasts. A lot. I can’t fully say way. Part of it is just what TV scholars call “flow,” the sheer rhythm of the broadcast schedule and its amenability to my own life schedule, getting ready for work in the morning, cooking dinner when I get home. Part of it is simply the desire to know what’s going on in the city I’ve lived in. And, well, I’m just obsessed with the non-celebrity celebrity of local TV news talent.
So it’s in the most loving way that I say that local TV newscasts are dreadful.
Some are worse than others… Channel 7’s the worst offender; Channel 5 the most hidebound and traditional; and Channel 4 rapidly remaking itself in WHDH image. But they all suffer from a bloated generic form that offers viewers little substantive knowledge (what used to come first in news) about the place where they live.
Everyone has their own solutions and recriminations. For mine, I thought I’d offer these eight rules that I think would make for better, even stellar, local news:
No “off the satellites” feed stories: I honestly don’t see why I need to follow car crashes, building collapses, crazy animal stories and the like in California, Montana, Ohio or Georgia.
No national and world news: If we’re going to see the clip of a Bush speech or footage of Iraq war on the nightly network newscast, we don’t need to see it on the local news. It’s not local news. And there are plenty of sources for Mel Gibson news.
No police blotter stuff: Obviously car crashes, late night fires, shootings and vandalism are big deals for those affected. But in a large metropolitan area, stuff is always happening and it’s frankly not that interesting to me to hear that some triple-decker somewhere caught on fire. Now, if the item is treated in genuine news fashion that’s another thing. The rising homicide rate in Boston is a big deal, and serial arsonists may prompt a story pondering insurance scams. But enough with the ambulance and firetruck chasing.
No magazine trend lists: Pulling press releases of this or that magazine’s Top 40 Cities to Go on a Blind Date In or Worst Places to Park Your Car is the height of journalistic laziness. These studies don’t even really measure anything other than some artificial numerical index. If you want a lifestyle feature, go through the trouble to assess air quality, or restaurant scenes, or fitness cultures, etc.
Cut back on the tease: Advertising and self-promotion is a part of life. But respect some limits, by for instance teasers that can only last as long as one quarter of the duration the actual item they’re promoting. When weatherfolks can give the whole forecast in the amount of time they pose rhetorical questions, that’s an insult to the viewer.
Provide political analysis: Give a realistic assessment of why political battles play out the way they do. Is Beacon Hill stalling on that insurance regulation legislation or on that health care bill because of political gamesmanship? Because of closely held beliefs? Because of the beliefs of their constituents? Because of lobbyist money? These are tough questions, sometimes involving subjective judgment calls, but as viewers, and outsiders, we deserve elucidation, not knee-jerk anti-politician rhetoric.
Cover city politics: Too often Boston appears on local news merely as the cultural touchstone of the media market: the center of public events and sports teams. Yet, the news ignores city politics in a way that would be unthinkable in almost any other major city.
Less emotional interpellation: I’ve never understood why local anchors – and local anchors alone – have been told it’s their job to perform sympathy and emotional cues in such an exaggerated way. National news anchors tell you the news and let you react. I don’t need the head-nodding, tut-tutting, and endless patter about Sox losses. It’s embarrassing. Channel 5 is the only station were they manage to be conversational without being smarmy.
This is all a pipedream, I know. But given a crumbling network oligopoly, you think at least one channel would differentiate itself.
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