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Television in weakness and in strength

Thursday, January 14, 2010

SOMETIMES I FEEL VERY DISLOYAL. To the medium that mostly nurtured me, that is.

I’ve probably worked in television more than in any other mode of mass communication, and yet these days I don’t often write about it. It’s frankly a lot more interesting to write about what are sometimes still called New Media ... about - to name but one area - fun-filled fripperies like the latest data-packed "killer app" for the iPhone, Android and/or Nexus One.

 

And besides … who do you know who actually watches television anymore? Really sits down and fixes their eyes on that box in the corner of the room or flat against the wall? Rarely has the old adage seemed so apt as it does today: “theater is life, film is art, but television is furniture".

 

However, I have to report that 2010 started with something of a jolt in media news. Temporary though it may well turn out to be, the first full week of our new decade saw those sinking flagships of the airwaves, the network TV news broadcasts, pulling in an uncommonly good haul of viewers. A combined total of more than 27 million people watched NBC’s Nightly News, ABC ’s World News and the CBS Evening News.
 
With Brian Williams anchoring, NBC hit a score - almost 11 million - which it hasn’t reached since 2006. Over at ABC, with Diane Sawyer still newly occupying the anchor seat in the wake of a somewhat (during the final handover celebrations, anyway) graceless Charlie Gibson, the show chalked up its best numbers in two years, nearly 9.5 million.

Katie Couric on CBS trailed as usual with a little over 7 million, but that number reversed her recent decline, putting her back to where she was a year ago.  
 
Disturbing news events like the near-bombing of the Detroit-bound airliner, and other security concerns, doubtless played their part in this statistical anomaly - but it does suggest that the more grimly determined obituarists of the networks, and especially of the news divisions, are composing their last dismissive sentences a little prematurely.

  

 

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SO YOU CAN STILL COUNT on the networks, at least for some water-cooler conversation. Even if it’s only discussion of contract-breaking by their highly-paid performers.
 
Conan O’Brien (above left) among all the various humiliations NBC has evidently heaped upon him, got especially perturbed at his viewership numbers being, he says, pushed down by The Jay Leno Show in its  brave new experimental slot, now abandoned, at 10.00pm. It’s an effect that, in O’Brien’s opinion, stretched dismally right through all the affiliate stations’ local news broadcasts, and helped pushed him, at 11.35pm, down to only 2.5 million viewers in recent weeks (- a little more than half of the audience that David Letterman gets in the same time-slot over at CBS).
 
O’Brien’s sharp, and remarkably unfunny, public statement may have contradicted reports (“set the record straight” he said) that he could show up on another network soon - and indeed his NBC contract supposedly precludes him from doing that, under pain of considerable penalties. But the no-longer-young-upstart Fox Network has done little to conceal the overtures it's made to the carrot-topped, faintly wonky host. Indeed, the president of Fox Entertainment, Kevin Reilly may have made some pretense of providing a "briefing", but it was more like energetic semaphoring when he told a reporter (the well-connected Bill Carter of The New York Times) that O’Brien “would be a very compatible fit for our brand”.
 

Don't we all love such delicate terms of discourse, so characteristic of Rupert Murdoch’s well-oiled multimedia machine? Its operatives often voice  an odd combination of dull corporate-speak and swaggering hubris
 
Fox language comes in a range of subtle variants. Fox News’ latest recruit as a political commentator – the totally unsurprising Sarah Palin – expressed early mastery of the parlance in (where else?) her Twittered tribute to her new colleagues: “I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News”.
 
And just to confirm how much she’ll be fitting in, she went on to text: “It's wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news”.
 
My parsing might be below par for this idiosyncratic vernacular, but I think “compatible fit for the brand” might have been a nice touch here, too.

 

 

TELEVISION UNDOUBTEDLY DOES some things best. Big visual news stories like a horrible natural disaster will always present an opportunity for this medium to be the most telling in its impact. Haiti’s earthquake is proving a powerful case in point (picture above right).
 
Not that any American TV news network has a bureau in the region any more. Consequently footage from the devastated capital Port-au-Prince was initially slow to reach our screens. A poignant exception was the baldly labeled “raw video” that the Associated Press’s TV news agency could almost immediately offer to broadcasters. It had come originally from my old colleagues at United Nations Television – resourceful recorders of the scene always, and in this case absolutely on-the-scene when it mattered.
 
The UN of course have had a mission in Haiti for almost 17 years – and their own headquarters building, in the Christopher Hotel, was badly destroyed, with well over a hundred staff reported missing (as of this morning) and at least a dozen killed, almost certainly including their leader, the wry and well-liked Tunisian chief-of-mission Hedi Annabi.

 

I knew him as a fine head of the African division of UN Peacekeeping Operations in the 1990s. He was always - and it seems terrible to say this now - very eager for his teams' work to be publicly accountable, and therefore filmed for worldwide television.

 

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