Rick Sanchez: “The Uninformant”

I have been inundated with questions about Rick Sanchez since he went after John Stewart and the Jews who run broadcasting and was subsequently fired last Friday. The most common question I’ve been asked is: “Would you have fired him.” I think the bigger question one should ask is whether I would have hired the man.

John Stewart easily proved that Rick Sanchez is a know nothing boob who did not have the knowledge necessary to do his job. Lisa de Moraes, in The TV Column writes: One example of Stewart’s derision came on March 2, when Stewart’s show ran clips of Sanchez anchoring CNN’s live coverage of a Chilean earthquake and the accompanying fears of a tsunami. In the clips, Sanchez is seen mistaking the Galapagos Islands for Hawaii and asking an expert to explain to him what nine meters means “in English.” Stewart called CNN “the most trusted name in overcaffeinated control freaks,” and Sanchez’s photo was shown above an identifier that read “The Uninformant!”

How does a guy who doesn’t know what a meter is or where America’s 50th state is located get an anchor job on a U.S. national network? Further, you may ask, doesn’t anyone at CNN ‘vet’ the hires? Don’t they check the background, knowledge and prejudices of the people they foist on the public and describe as journalists and news people?

The obvious answer is that they don’t do their due diligence and they don’t seem to care unless the guy or girl loses their cool and blurts out a racist remark. Sanchez was fired for his comments about Jews, not his ignorance of basic facts. I for one, find that a frightening proposition because it demeans all journalists, all journalism and certainly everyone involved with broadcast news. All we have is our authority and the trust of the audience. If we lose that we will cease to matter.

The anchor position in a newscast has undergone many changes in the past few decades. There was a time when all you had to do is read what others wrote and look good doing it. Good hair and smart suits were more important than good news judgment and smarts. Thankfully, that began to change in the era of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. These guys were authority figures. We knew we could trust what they said because we knew we could trust them to know what they were talking about. They weren’t what we later called “meat puppets,” they were newsmen, journalists.

Eventually that rubbed off on local news. It took decades, not years, but we finally reached the point where if you want to be an anchor in Calgary, Dallas, Halifax or Minneapolis, you had better have reporting experience. Sure there are a few old time announcers hanging in, although at the national level Lloyd Robertson is likely to be the last, but they should all be gone sooner rather than later.

Authority and trust, I thought, had become the most important attributes in choosing a new news anchor. That however, is beginning to change and it’s the all-news channels in the U.S. that are leading the movement towards blow-hards and shock-jocks. Fox may be the worst offender, but as Rick Sanchez and CNN have proved, they are not the only ones. Jeffrey Dvorkin wrote a terrific analysis in his blog, Now the Details http://www.nowthedetails.blogspot.com, he said, I do blame CNN: it allowed Sanchez (and others like him) on the air and seems unable to find its role, squeezed by the bloviators on Fox and the more thoughtful journalism to be found elsewhere on TV and radio. He also points out that in the U.S. there is actually nothing new in this trend: There is also a long tradition in American broadcasting of extreme opinions going back to Father Coughlin in Detroit in the 30s and 40s. Walter Winchell became equally paranoid in his later career and was one of the more effective red-baiters in the Cold War. Sanchez, Beck, O’Reilly and Limbaugh are entirely within that tradition.

This is where you are thinking that the recent hires at the national networks in both the U.S. and Canada have been experienced news people who take their roles seriously and for the most part, that’s true. But I remember the days, and it wasn’t that long ago, where newscasts were filled with solid news content and nothing but solid news content. Paris Hilton couldn’t buy her way onto a newscast and to get the results of last night’s American Idol, if it had existed, you would have to watch American Idol. Then came shows like A Current Affair and eventually Entertainment Tonight. They blurred the boundaries. I met people who said yes, they saw the news, and it turned out they were watching A Current Affair. I have seen that style infect serious newscasts and grow to be an everyday part of what we now consider news.

Is it possible that Glenn Beck will eventually infect the role of the anchor? I hope not, but it is possible. Have you seen the ads for Dawna Friesen on Global? The marketing people at Global go out and hire a serious news woman with all the right credentials and then try to sell her to the public as a soccer mom. Where’s the authority? Where’s the journalist? Were Cronkite or Brinkley sold to the public as dads? Is it because she is a woman? It makes you wonder to what lengths Global will go to sell their news. Perhaps if Friesen doesn’t work out they will follow Fox’s lead. It seems far-fetched today, but then if I had told anyone in the news business 30 years ago that clips from Survivor would make it to a newscast they would have laughed and said it could never happen.

Filed under: Media Commentary, Chet Huntley, CNN, David Brinkley, Dawna Friesen, Entertainment Tonight, Glenn Beck, Global, John Stewart, Lloyd Robertson, Rick Sanchez, Rush Limbaugh, Walter Cronkite

The Female Anchor

It’s been a relatively quiet week in the TV and television news business. While I was contemplating what to write about this week I got a phone call from a friend who is one of the top journalists in Canada. He was incensed at a couple of things that I barely noticed. Perhaps it was the afterglow of watching my daughter get married last week, but I failed to make the connections he had made.

The first thing that rankled was the reaction to Global and CTV announcing female anchors for their national newscasts. Two things here are wrong. Every newspaper we saw had at least one commentary that suggested that CBC would have to get rid of Peter Mansbridge so that they could hire a female anchor too. It was as if CBC was left out of the party.

Look, I think it is time for Peter to think about leaving his anchor post, but not because CTV named Lisa Laflamme to take over from Lloyd Robertson and Global hired Dawna Friesen. After more than a decade of failing to grab very good ratings and a year of dreadful response and massive audience loss, it is obvious that Peter Mansbridge is not connecting to the majority of news viewers. Since Walter Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News there has been a simple test for the success or failure of a news anchor. When an anchor’s name becomes synonymous with the newscast you have a winner. Nobody in the 60’s or 70’s said they were going to watch CBS Evening News. Few even knew the real name of the program. It was just ‘Walter.’ I’m watching ‘Walter.’ Let’s watch ‘Walter.’ Did you see ‘Walter’ last night? The same is true at CTV. It is as if the name of CTV’s national newscast is ‘Lloyd.’ I watched ‘Lloyd’ last night. ‘Lloyd’ had a great story on the G-20 summit. I have never heard anyone call The National ‘Peter.’

Further, I don’t think CBC has to get a female to replace Peter. I think CBC has to get an excellent communicator that can create a bond with the Canadian news audience be it a male or a female.

In fact the comments about Peter are actually demeaning to both Dawna Friesen and Lisa Laflamme. From where I sit they earned their new positions the hard way. They worked for them. They were both first rate reporters who climbed the journalistic ladder with solid work. They didn’t get their jobs because they are female. It wasn’t some kind of publicity stunt to attract viewers. They were chosen by their news bosses as the best qualified for the job. The writers who perpetrated this farcical angle should be ashamed. So should the editors who published this nonsense.

On a far darker note, newspapers, TV newscasts and radio news also went way over the line in trying to create a story where none exists and perhaps ignored an important story in the process. Last week Michael Ignatieff began a cross country election style bus tour of Canada. He is hoping to make personal appearances in hundreds of communities across the country. So far so good. Unfortunately his bus broke down on the first day of the campaign style tour.

That’s when the knives came out in the most unfair way possible. Ignatieff’s leadership was blamed for the breakdown.Instead of reporting on the stops Ignatieff made that day, rather than comment on what he had to say or the relative size of the crowds he attracted, people who call themselves journalists reported on the bus breakdown and how that breakdown is an example of Ignatieff’s failure as Liberal leader.

I am no fan of Ignatieff’s leadership so far. He has shown little political skill, he has not connected to voters, and he has seemed weak in the parliamentary give and take. But I do not think the fact that his rented bus broke down has anything to do with his abilities or failures as a potential Prime Minister. So far as I know he didn’t build the bus, he wasn’t the mechanic that sent it out on the road, heck, he wasn’t even the bus driver. What does the mechanical failure of a mode of transport have to do with anything and why is every political journalist connecting the broken down bus to Ignatieff’s leadership. Worse still why dwell on what is at best a symbol without actually covering the real story.

Isn’t it interesting that although Ignatieff was able to get to his next meeting and in the days since he has successfully made his way from town to town and from event to event, the Canadian media has once again gone back to ignoring the political story here: a desperate leader of a floundering party is desperately looking rehab his image and connect with Canadians. Is he succeeding? I guess the press will never let us know. How can that story compare to a broken down bus and all that we can learn from it?

It is becoming more and more difficult every day to apologize for the faltering journalism standards in this country. There was a time when I was proud of the work we did. Now, more often than not, I am embarrassed

Filed under: Media Commentary, Political Commentary, CBC News, CTV News, Dawna Friesen, Global News, Lisa Laflamme, Lloyd Robertson, Michael Ignatieff, Peter Mansbridge, Walter Cronkite

Where was the News?

After seventeen glorious days the Olympics have come to an end. In Canada all seems right with the world. We won the most gold medals ever and of course, maybe more importantly, we won gold in hockey. The universe has unfolded as it should, at least north of the 49th parallel.

I will resist the inclination to heap too much more praise on the Olympic broadcasters. I thought they did a great job, some of you have had very specific complaints, I would characterize them as niggles. All I will say is that no Olympics has ever had total coverage in high definition of all the sports from all the venues. The fact that you had to be a subscriber to many of the channels is not the consortium’s fault. It was made clear from the time CTV, Rogers, APTN etcetera won the right to cover the games that events would appear on all the various and sundry channels that came under the consortium’s umbrella. If you did have access to all the channels you could choose to see every event live and in its entirety. That is a massive technological feat and one that was delivered as promised.

Where there was a major failure was with CTV and The Globe and Mail’s coverage of actual news during the Olympics. It’s one thing to be a shill, as former CBC News and NPR boss Jeffery Dvorkin points out, this is normal. Broadcasters always hype their own events. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I am referring to CTV News going seventeen days without a proper newscast. Five minutes of Lloyd at 11 p.m. give or take ten minutes depending on what Olympic event was finishing or starting is abysmal enough. Worse, on most nights, the five minutes of news provided by CTV was taken up by three minutes of what Brian Williams had just told us about the Olympic results.

CTV can have no excuse for ignoring the news of the world. On most days because of poor weather and built in extra days to make up for bad weather, there were long stretches where nothing was going on. Brian Williams was called on many times to fill airtime when there was no event to throw to.

Further still, there are two TSNs, four Rogers Sportsnets, APTN, Much Music and more channels that were available to pick up 30 minutes of slack per day while CTV provided a decent newscast.

Over at The Globe and Mail the editors decided that if you can’t beat them join them. Day after day the news was discarded for more Olympic stories. The front section never had more than three pages of non-Olympic news…oh, unless you consider three pages of sports news tacked onto the end of the front section most days.

The Globe insists it is Canada’s national newspaper. In that case doesn’t it have a duty to cover more events in Canada and the world than the self-sponsored and self-owned Olympic coverage? If a huge non-Olympic story took place in the last two and one-half weeks I defy a Globe reader or a CTV viewer to identify it. Can’t. They just don’t know about it.

For two media, newspapers and television, that are supposed to be hard hit by the new media they showed no understanding of their precarious situation. Any news junkie who cared was forced to scour the internet for news. Some of those people will have found new sources for their news content and won’t readily return to The Globe or CTV. Only this time CTVglobemedia will have no one to blame but themselves. One question though, what did all the news reporters do for the past two weeks? A paid holiday in the south I hope.

On a completely different note, I do hope my non-Toronto readers will forgive me a short rant. Last week one of the most popular broadcasters in Toronto left his show. Andy Barrie had hosted the morning show on CBC radio for decades and he was a major success story. In a crowded market he was number one. Quite a feat for him personally and for CBC Radio. Andy was not my cup of tea, I found him soft in a crunchy granola, Birckenstock kind of way, but I was always impressed by his popularity and success.

In other words, he will be very hard act to follow. Matt Galloway, Andy’s replacement has been an excellent host of the 4 to 6 show in Toronto. Unfortunately for Matt he is replacing an icon. That’s a difficult job under any circumstances. Matt has to know that he will continually be compared to Andy by a listenership that has been loyal to Andy for a very long time. So what do the brilliant producers of the morning show do? After a week of long goodbyes and tributes to Andy Barrie, the idiots at CBC radio bring Andy back for an encore and an even longer goodbye on Matt’s first show. This is lunacy. Why can’t the bozos at CBC Radio let go?

Matt Galloway should have been given a clean start to his own show, an opportunity to make the morning show his own. Ted Koppel didn’t show up on Nightline on the next show after he retired, Walter Cronkite didn’t return for a bow on CBS Evening News, Johnny Carson didn’t return to show up Jay Leno, Harvey Kirk and Knowlton Nash didn’t come back to haunt Peter and Lloyd. This sort of thing is just not done. It’s unseemly. Andy should have known better. The producers should have known better. The fact that it happened speaks to a dysfunctional CBC.

Filed under: Media Commentary, Andy Barrie, APTN, Brian Williams, CBC News, CBC Radio, CTV News, Harvey Kirk, Jay Leno, Johnny Carson, Knowlton Nash, Matt Galloway, Rogers Sportsnet, Ted Koppel, The Globe and Mail, Walter Cronkite

Hewitt’s Law

I just returned from over a week in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. The weather was great. The scenery was beautiful. The company was amazing. The only negative was trying to watch TV. The current coverage of Obama’s healthcare reforms is enough to drive even the most hardened news junkie away from the television. American networks are dropping the ball big time. They are not delivering the facts. They are allowing falsehood after falsehood to make it to air with little or no comment. If I worked for news at CBS, NBC, ABC, or CNN I would be hanging my head in shame and telling the people I met that I was an accountant.

But that’s not what I want to talk about: the poor coverage of healthcare reform is just a jumping off point to talk about Don Hewitt. Hewitt was one of the creators of television news and current affairs. We all know him for 60 Minutes but he goes back a long way before that. He produced Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News and Edward R. Murrow before that. He wrote the very vocabulary that television journalism uses and he did it from scratch. There was no TV news before Hewitt.

Lucky for all of us who have followed in his footsteps in broadcast journalism, he set the standards.

I wonder what he would say if he watched tonight’s evening newscasts in the U.S.? I think I know. He would wonder what happened to the story telling. Why are the reporters dealing with issues and not telling stories about people. What about the story of a working class family that can’t afford health insurance? Where’s the story about the middle class dad who’s afraid of losing his company-paid-for insurance? How about the couple on Medicare or Medicaid, government programs, telling us how well or how poorly these programs work for them? Those are just a few of the possibilities.

You see, the true genius of Don Hewitt was his understanding of three small things that every broadcast journalist should know without thinking. They should be automatic – like breathing. They were the backbone of all Don Hewitt accomplished and stood for and they are deceptively simple.

The first is to “tell me a story.” It was his mantra. When you wanted to get something on the air he demanded this simple act from you, the ability to tell an interesting story. What is more basic in broadcasting? Nothing. If you are not a story teller you should not be a journalist. In fact, if you are not a story teller you should not work in TV, radio or film. The ability to weave a tale that will grab the viewer’s attention and hold it is the singular most important craft that we have to perfect to do our jobs. When the powers that be are weeding out applicants for jobs that’s all they should look for. We can teach the rest. Cameras, edit suites, microphones…these are just the tools we use. We can learn how to use them in one year of community college. Story telling…that’s innate, something you are born with.
Don Hewitt’s second rule is even more abused by modern broadcast journalists than his first. He demanded that every story be entertaining. He realized immediately upon joining CBS TV in the late 1940’s that television is an entertainment medium. People don’t turn on their TV to watch the news, they turn it on to see House, CSI and Family Guy. Go ahead, ask your neighbors what their favorite TV show is. None will say it is the news, I guarantee it. Even though this is more important today in the 200 channel universe it appears to be less understood.

When I worked at CBC News they were upset with me for telling my staff to make their stories entertaining. I had to come up with a new description the bosses would accept. I called for “engaging” stories. Today’s newscasts are anything but entertaining. The CBC is the worst offender and the changes they are talking about threaten to squeeze the last bits of entertainment from their newscasts. They don’t seem to understand that their competition is not CTV News and CBS News, it is CSI Miami and Law and Order. Even the 6:30 U.S. newscasts are going up against reruns of NCIS and 2 ½ Men. To Don Hewitt this was obvious.

Finally, Hewitt understood that people do not relate to issues, they relate to people. He demanded that his reporters and producers put a human face on every story. It seems simple and obvious to me as it did to Don Hewitt but I still see story after story on the news that deals with the issues of the healthcare debate without telling me how they affect a single human being. Why should I care about the deficit? Why do we have to help the banks stay afloat? There are real people, Americans, who are affected by what government does. Who is telling their stories?

Don Hewitt’s three simple rules should be the first thing we teach journalism students. They should be automatically understood by everyone who works in TV and radio news. Sadly they are not. In fact we are losing our acceptance of these basic rules. Just watch the news and you will see.

Like all great artists Don Hewitt’s genius was his understanding of the simple truths, the basics, and he never strayed from that. Even though I never met the man I am sad that he is gone. We need his wisdom more than ever. I’m afraid we will miss him more than we will ever know.

Filed under: Uncategorized, 60 Minutes, ABC, CBC News, CBS, CNN, CSI, CTV News, Don Hewitt, Edward R. Murrow, healthcare, House, NBC, NCIS, Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite and the Golden Age of TV News

One of my favorite lines about the sixties states that if you remember them, you weren’t there. I am not sure what I remember and what I don’t but there are some memories that do stand out: the assassination of President Kennedy, the arrival of the Beatles, the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention, The Vietnam War, Kent State, the moon landing, and I know I’m stretching into the early seventies, the Watergate break-in leading to the Watergate hearings and the downfall of Richard Nixon.

If you asked me what all of these events had in common yesterday I would have waffled and come up with some platitudes about the “hippy” era and the baby boom. Today the answer is clear to me: they mark a golden age of television journalism. The golden boy of that golden age was Walter Cronkite.

It will be hard for anyone under the age of 50 to understand the real power of television news in the sixties and seventies. Without understanding that power it will be impossible to understand the greatness of “Uncle Walter.”

Just about everyone in North America got almost all their news from television. Polls at the time said 75% got 100% of their news from TV. And the man who was the most trusted man in America through those times was Walter Cronkite, a news anchor and journalist.

When Walter was the anchor at CBS I never knew the name of the CBS national newscast. I never heard anyone say they were going to watch The CBS Evening News. You said you were going to watch Cronkite, or Walter, it was like calling all tissue paper Kleenex, Walter Cronkite was more than the brand he was the product. Nobody before or since in Canada or the United States has come close to that kind of power and reach.

Whenever I hired a news anchor it was Walter Cronkite I sought to find. I remember telling my boss at CBC that no host of a show is a success until the host’s name replaces the name of the program in the viewers’ minds. So what was I looking for? I wanted a person who had real journalism experience in the field so that they could empathize with both the reporters and the subjects of the stories. I wanted a person of integrity for whom the story was everything. I wanted someone who was willing to display their humanity on air. Most of all I wanted someone the audience immediately trusted. Walter Cronkite had all of that and one more thing, perhaps the most elusive thing of all, he was a star.

You see it has always been my belief that television is one of the greatest lie detectors man has ever devised. When someone is talking to you on TV you somehow know if they are telling the truth. You can read their character. In 1960 people who heard the debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy on radio thought Nixon won the debate. Television viewers were even more certain that Kennedy won. Viewers know when a host or anchor is being real. I believe the success of Lloyd Robertson is that he is exactly the same on and off camera. You see Lloyd on TV you know the man. In Canada, Barbara Frum had many of the same qualities. In the U.S. Johnny Carson was the only person that was in the same league as Walter.

Unfortunately there will never be another Walter Cronkite. Sure there will be great news people, great television hosts, but the world has changed. Television news will never be as important as it was. The internet has seen to that. The opportunity to speak to and sometimes for all the people just does not exist anymore in any medium.

The TV news business has changed too. It used to be a reporter centric medium where the guy on the site of the story provided the all the answers. Today it’s the news desk that writes and produces the stories. The reporter in most cases is just a face holding a microphone. It’s not a lack of reporting talent, it’s a lack of time. In the golden age a reporter had to produce one quality news story per day. Today they have to file for radio, TV, the internet and in some cases for multiple newscasts all day long. They have no time to think let alone assess a story.

Speed has become as important, if not more, than accuracy. And the technology allows for live reporting from any scene anywhere in the world. That means an anchor sitting in New York or Toronto is expected to comment on a story that’s happening right now in Teheran or Beijing. If we have the live pictures we go to air. The technology that was supposed to make TV news more accurate has in fact devalued the news. How can a man or woman sitting at a desk really know what’s happening 10,000 miles away?

A more important change has occurred since the Vietnam War. Politicians came to understand the power of TV. President Lyndon Johnson, I believe was first when he was quoted as saying that when he lost Walter Cronkite’s support for the war in Vietnam, he lost the American people. He decided not to run for re-election. Smart politicians since that time have learned the art of spin. Spin doctors are among their most important staff members. The purpose of all of this is to manipulate the media. In Walter’s time the media, to quote Marshall McLuhan, was the message. Today they are pawns to the message. The power has shifted. The Carl Roves of the world are better at getting their stories out than the reporters that cover them. Carl and his buddies have the time, the expertise and the money. All the reporters have is a camera and a microphone…easy pickings for the pros.

In the end it is no surprise that TV news just isn’t what it used to be. There are too many factors weighing against television journalism.

So when we look back at Walter Cronkite’s career and his amazing accomplishments we should shed a tear not just for the loss a great pioneer and icon but for television journalism. Walter Cronkite is both an example and a symbol of what it has lost and what it has become.

Filed under: Media Commentary, Political Commentary, Barbara Frum, Carl Rove, CBS, John F. Kennedy, Johnny Carson, Lloyd Robertson, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon, The Beatles, Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite