Tied up in tackiness
Thursday, August 14, 2008
OUR WESTERN MEDIA’S EYES were fixed so firmly – and in NBC’s case focused with such damaging exclusivity – on China, that Russia’s attack on neighboring Georgia completely wrong-footed just about everyone.
Newsrooms everywhere were having to scramble, but it looked especially and embarrassingly humiliating when Brian Williams, anchoring the NBC Nightly News from – where else? – Beijing, had to introduce a report on the deadly Caucasus invasion not from one of his network News Division’s fine, hardened war correspondents … but from my erstwhile colleague out of London, Julian Manyon (above left) – one of British Independent Television News’ fine, hardened etceteras. A good, scoopy job he did, too, capturing the desperateness of South Ossetians in the face of overwhelming Russian force.
It took another four days before Williams was able eventually to announce: “our own Jim Maceda has made it inside Georgia to cover the fighting”. Maceda too, naturally enough, is fine, hardened etc … but he was also undeniably tardy, certainly compared with his counterpart from the UK.
Unhappily it’s not at all surprising to see such slowness of reaction these days, Olympic obsession or no Olympic obsession. At fault are the all-too-familiar cutbacks in American media’s overseas coverage; they are measured most clearly by the precipitous draw-down in the number of international bureaus in operation now.
NBC is not alone in this cost-driven retreat into parochialism, of course. The Pew Research Center’s admirable watchdog, the Project for Excellence in Journalism calculates that the proportion of output devoted to foreign coverage has now slumped to just 8% of all TV networks’ main evening news airtime. And US newspapers fare a little better, but not much, by devoting 13% of their column-inches to overseas stories.
Interestingly, it’s on the World Wide Web’s news-sites that journalism junkies can get a much bigger fix of international dispatches, proportionately speaking – such coverage registers at 25% of the news material available online.
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ONE MORE TELLING SIGN OF NBC GETTING ITSELF BOGGED DOWN BY BEIJING came with the Fake Footprints Affair. This tawdry tale turned out in many ways more troubling than the company getting tied up in knots over the delayed timing of broadcasts, when so many viewers could get access anyway, and anytime, thanks to the internet.
Ever since the gutsy Beijing Times newspaper was the first to reveal that what TV viewers saw during the "astonishing fireworks display" on Olympics opening night was in fact phony - indeed was the creation of hundreds of hard-working digital graphic artists - it’s been embarrassing (once again) to witness the so-called Peacock Network's clumsy efforts at damage-control.
Apparently those 29 giant footprints-in-lights (above center, one is caught, a little fuzzily from below) that paced forward to represent the 29 Olympiads of the modern era advancing toward China’s turn to host the games this year, proved to be a tad beyond the reach of real gunpowder-based pyrotechnics to depict crisply.
Accordingly “for convenience and theatrical effect” - according to a Chinese games official - the image transmitted round the world via NBC was a more reliable computer-generated version compiled by the production house Beijing Olympic Broadcasting. And, ever so cunningly, it even included a little fake judder to suggest the shot came from a hovering helicopter.
For NBC Sports, press officer Adam Freifeld cravenly denied responsibility, saying “It's not our production," and he claimed: "Our guys were very clear that this was animation."
I suppose it depends on what you mean by “very clear”. What their guy Matt Lauer actually said, live, during the broadcast was:
“You’re looking now at the footsteps of history quite literally (my emphasis) coming from the old center of Beijing.”
Lauer he tried to fudge the issue a bit: “You're looking at a cinematic device employed by (director) Zhang Yimou here. This is actually almost animation."
Maybe it also depends on what you mean by “almost”.
Combined with the revelations about Chinese authorities substituting a “cute” 9-year old girl lip-syncing for the real little singer who had crooked teeth and was kept off-screen, it all amounted to just so much stomach-turning fakery.
And petty evasion by NBC served only to underline the tackiness of it all. That weasel-like quote I mentioned above was prised out of the hapless spokesman Freifeld by National Public Radio – but the hack refused to speak to reporters on tape for broadcast. He only works for the National Broadcasting Corporation, right?
I’M ALWAYS HAPPY TO BE REPORTING THIS COLUMN FROM NEW YORK - it is the media capital of the world, after all.
But one vital medium of expression, the theater – with its own solid base here, on Old Broadway, and with its own fair claim to international pre-eminence – is showing signs of turning its back on this city.
Some of the juves and other thesps, the angels and the producers who populate the theater district are registering concern that more new shows are deciding to open out of town and then go touring, without ever coming to this purported capital. For instance the new musical version of Little House on the Prairie starring Melissa Gilbert (above right), much matured since her child role in the 1970s TV series, opened in Minneapolis to record-breaking success, and now is booked for a 40-week tour throughout the US - but not in the Big Apple.
Dreamgirls and Disney’s High School Musical are also committed to sticking to what Variety magazine will probably always call the “Stix” - ever since its infamous 1935 headline "STIX NIX HICK PIX" about regional distaste for movies featuring rustic characters.
Even given the notional financial loss to the Times Square area, I don’t suppose many theater people here will be too downcast. The traveling properties will always carry the label of “mass-appeal”, and be somewhat scorned as such.
Meanwhile, higher brows can look forward to a Fall season on Broadway of promising fare - like a wholly new home-grown production from the Roundabout Company of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons with Frank Langella as Sir Thomas More, and the stellar British import, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull from the Royal Court Theatre, starring Kristin Scott Thomas.
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