Tabloids Invade TV News!

__"Local News: The Biggest Scandal on TV" by Steven D. Stark, in the Washington Monthly (June 1997), 1611 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009; "News Lite" by James McCartney, in American Journalism Review (June 1997), 8701 Adelphi Road, Adelphi, Md. 20783–1716.__

No matter what the community in America, the local TV news is much the same: crimes, disasters, and fluff, all served up by two relentlessly personable anchorpersons and their eager-to-please young correspondents, reporting and chatting "live" from various corners of the community and nation. It’s not just their shallowness that makes these news shows so objectionable, argues Stark, author of Glued to the Set (1997); it’s the fact that they’ve become so immensely influential. Sixty-five percent of adults in a 1996 survey reported watching the local TV news, compared with only 42 percent who tuned in to TV network newscasts.

Local news shows once were "an insignificant part of the television day," Stark recalls. But in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, stations began to grasp the shows’ profit potential. They are relatively cheap to produce, and the local stations can keep the profits (which they can’t do with network programming). Local newscasts grew to a half-hour, right before the evening network news; then to an hour, even 90 minutes.

Taking the advice of media consultants, Stark notes, the stations began offering "happy talk" news, with personable "anchors" as the principal attraction, and tabloidlike "action news" (a.k.a. "eyewitness news"), with "a high story count, an increasing number of striking visuals, and exciting upbeat music." The formula worked. Such newscasts soon began to generate between one-third and one-half of local stations’ total profits.

By the 1980s, communications satellites and other technological advances enabled local stations to send their own correspondents to national and international events, scooping the network news programs. The Cable News Network, established in 1980, also began selling news footage to local news operations, and local affiliates of the Big Three broadcast networks then forced them to share their own jealously guarded film. Gradually, says Stark, local stations became "the average viewer’s window on the whole world," and the locals’ tabloid style "became the trademark of national and international coverage."

Now, the networks themselves are going "tabloid," with the trend especially evident in the last year or so, says McCartney. A typical NBC evening news broadcast reports only five or six traditional "hard news" items, com-viewers the lowdown on such subjects as daypared with about 20 in the Huntley-Brinkley dreams, telephone psychics, and unidentiheyday. Instead of news about government fied flying objects. Today, it seems, all TV and world events, the networks are giving news is "local."