Roger Catlin | TV Eye

'News to Me'

The weekend show on CNN Headline News sounds like it’d be one of those odd cable news stabs at comedy show if only because News to Me is something Kevin Nealon used to say when signing off "Weekend Update" on "Saturday Night Live."

Instead, the show is one of those compendium of viewer-uploaded reports along with an array of viral videos gleaned from the internet.

We’ve seen all of this before, of course. Viewer made video is a staple of Current TV and other interactive channels. Networks have been plucking viral videos from YouTube for years in an attempt to stay up with the phenomenon (and try to appear cool).

What’s wrong with the Headline News version is that it’s entirely narrated by a bald guy named Eric Lanford who adds a wacky elevated voice to everything (they felt they couldn’t leave the narration to the "real people" they were otherwise giving up their show to).

The reports seemed put together by Headline News staff as well. Instead of something from the guy who writes the Army of Dude blog, he was interviewed (via webcam, natch) while some of his stuff showed on the other screen. Ditto from a guy who went to Cuba and took some photos.

A lot of art projects are suited for this kind of coverage (which tells you a little something about the art world). And there were two on Sunday’s report, one about a guy who shoots pictures of the single shoes left on the side of the road; another about sculptures of tiny people set out in the urban landscape of London.

It’s all over before you know it and Lanford ties it altogether by talking to people in the mall outside of CNN in Atlanta, as if this is where real people congregate.

Well, it could be worse, I guess. It could be hosted by Glen Beck or Nancy Grace.

Shifting News Priorities

I was encouraged, for a second, to learn that at a time when newspapers seem to be shedding its cultural and arts reporters as the industry accelerates its death spiral, that the Associated Press was in fact increasing its entertainment news staff by 21.

Before I had time to start congratulating their far-sightedness (or begin preparing a resume), it became clear, through the reporting of Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood, that their idea of entertainment is more along the lines of "Extra" and "TMZ."

It’s not entertainment news so much as celebrity obsessing, a shame especially from an organization that tried as an experiment a year ago this month to halt all news of Paris Hilton for a week (back when Paris Hilton was the day’s Britney Spears). The venerable wire service was doing so to make a statement, to take a stand, to draw a line in the…. Well, it didn’t even last a week. She got a trafific ticket or something and they HAD to report that.

Now, there will be whole desks devoted to vulture-like coverage of the celebrity of the day. The L.A. bureau of the AP were told earlier this year that "now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal."

Now was there a corollary memo regarding Iraq?

The Project for Excellence in Journalism announced over the weekend that coverage of the war in all news media Iraq is about a fifth of what it was as recently as last summer. As the U.S. death toll hit 4,000 Sunday, the milestone was tucked away inside papers (page 3 in the Courant).

Some blame the documented shinkage in war reporting a shift in resources – none so clear than that at AP’s 24\17 Britney Desk.

Diane Sawyer Discovers Prostitutes

I couldn’t believe the hype over the two hour "20/20" special Friday. There were actually wire stories touting the major report titled "Prostitution in America: Working Girls Speak."

It had been in the works two years, host Diane Sawyer said, but it came to air a few weeks early in the wake of the scandal of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who had to step down after it was discovered he had spent thousands on high-priced call girls in Washington, D.C.

If Sawyer and her team were really interesting in blowing off the lid of the dirty little world of prostitution they could have done so with a simple premium cable subscription.

HBO’s "Cathouse: The Series" in fact is centered at the very legal brothel that they focused on, the "World Famous Bunny Ranch" where many of its top earners are in fact recognizable from the HBO series. There was chubby owner Dennis Hof and a number of the same working gals who are followed with some of the same scruitny -- or more -- given by the ABC News team.

She went a few other places, the bleaker corners of Philadelphia, with a supposed high-ticket callgirl whose story, Sawyer admitted, couldn't be verified at all. And there were some of the craziest stories you've ever heard including men who paid women to stomp on baby kittens for them (couldn't this be a metaphor for something?).

For all the time they purported to spend on the issue, they are much less close to the situation than Lisa Ling does in her new strong documentary airing next week: "Sex Workers or Victims?" a film in their "Who Cares About Girls Documentary Series."

Although like "Cathouse" it has a little titillation, HBO documentaries such as "Hookers at the Point," which also happened to be showing Friday at midnight, show a grittier realism that's more realistic without enduring Sawyer's disapproving frown.

There was a recent documentary series on Sundance chronicling another brothel in Nevada that was more eye-opening in its realism than the candy-coated gloss of "Cathouse." "Pleasure for Sale" concentrated on the economic realities that led women to join the life, including a wife who went to work after her husband was laid off and couldn't find another job.

The "20/20" special could have used that angle. Maybe if they had taken another two years..

Stitched Anderson Cooper No Streetfighter

Midway through "Anderson Cooper 360" Wednesday, the host had to explain that little red mark under his left eye. New tattoo? Flesh eating bacteria? None of the above.

"I had some minor on Monday, a little cancerous thing on my face," Cooper explained, as if to respond to the alarm it was bringing to viewers on the night he was to interview Barack Obama.

"I have six stitches on my face, as you can see. But everything's fine. We’ve been getting  a lot of e-mails about it. I appreciate all the concern. But it’s really no big deal."

"Are you sure it was just surgery?" anchor Erica Hill teased him. "There wasn't a tussle, there wasn't a little, I don’t know, incident with Charlie Rose, or someone, a MacBook  Air?"

Rose turned up on his talk show Monday with a horrible shiner and bandage and a story about a spill; it later came out that he tripped in a pothole and on the way down decided to save his laptop instead of protecting his face.

But Cooper liked this idea.

"You’re alleging I got in a streetfight with Charlie Rose? That we often come to blows and fisticuffs?" he asked her. "Sadly, no. But, had that been a fight it looks like Charlie would have gotten the worse end of the deal."

Actually the mark made the boyish newsman look a little tougher; as if he had removed one of those prison tattoos of a teardrop, indicating he had killed a guy.

Hue and Cry

Less than a half hour before Hillary Clinton was declared winner of the Texas primary about 12:47 a.m. Wednesday on MSNBC, the reporters there were fretting about how they would reflect it, colorwise.

Yes, the Democrats would be blue of course. But would the Lone Star State be the navy blue they'd been giving states Clinton has won, or the powder blue they'd been using to indicate states won by Barack Obama?

"Not only is it too close to call," mused anchor Keith Olbermann. "But when it's called, the winner may not win."

As such MSNBC Political director Chuck Todd worried about hue.

"What color do we make Texas if she wins the popular vote and he wins the delegate haul?" he wondered. "What color do we make it? Which blue do we use? Do we blend the blue together? Do we stripe it?"

He sounded as if he were about to call in a decorator.

Over on CNN, John King had found a solution, through the magic touch screens they use. Touch it and the state of Texas grows big, you can see every county and each of those counties get a light or dark blue designation. There is no consensus on the blue shading as yet though; CNN had Obama in dark blue instead of light; the predominant Clinton was all in light blue instead of dark. They didn't have to use stripes.

The First 'Fox 61 Morning News Show'

The Fox 61 Morning Show began its run today, with its staff crowded into overstuffed couches on a living room set.

Was their desk not ready? No, they wanted to give a more casual feel to the show, the latest entry into the crowded morning news field.

"We think it sets us apart here in the market," says co-anchor Rebecca Stewart.

And it is a cluttered market. There are now more head to head local news shows in the morning than there are any other time of day, with the new offering from Fox 61 (which like the Courant is owned by the Tribune Co.) up against long established shows on WFSB, WVIT and WTNH.

All three of those shows have not only been on the air longer than WTIC Channel 61, they also start a full hour earlier, at 5 a.m.

None of these shows not meant to be watched in their full two or three hour lengths, but rather in 10 minute portions. In fact as soon as the weather cycles around again you know it’s time to move on with your own day.

And weather is what drives all of these shows, proving that either people must not be using home thermometers anymore or they have all been brainwashed into thinking they won’t understand what’s going to happen until they see a Doppler radar map in motion.

A minute after the chatty 6 a.m. opening of the first "Fox 61 Morning Show," Stewart says with some urgency, "We want to get what’s happening right now" and doesn’t turn to news but to weather.

Joe Furey is a familiar voice if not face to Connecticut broadcasting, he knows what he’s doing at the weather board and is used to repeating himself several times a morning. His main problem Monday was starting his weather segment (on the 6’s) without a working microphone three times in a row.

If Furey seems a little frazzled though it’s because he’s also still doing his roster of morning radio forecasts for a roster of stations, as is Rachel Lutzker, the popular former traffic reporter on WFSB who at last was starting her assignment at the new TV station (as well as still fulfilling her morning radio duties).

Zipping from her set to the radio center, she said in mock exhaustion toward the end of the show "I'm going to need roller blades," adding, "At least I don't have to go to the gym any more."

Her traffic set up is not too different from the one she left behind – a busy computer generated map with green arrows on the main arteries along with speed signs indicating circulation. Yellow or red roads indicate slowdown or stopped situation. The segments end with one of those live shots from the fixed Department of Transportation cameras, which at 6 a.m. are about as useless as they are at 5 a.m. – these roads are pretty much empty.

Lutzker’s main interplay is with Furey, but she’s already poking fun at co-anchor Logan Byrnes and particularly the boat he docks in New London.

He's a good target. Byrnes is a classic Ken doll of an anchor (and son of Edd “Kookie” Byrnes) who is always nodding saying things like "Fantastic!" And "Good stuff!"

He’s so casual that his pinstripe jacket covers a short-collared blue shirt – and no tie. Wait. Is he still wearing his pajamas?

Analog Anchors Aweigh

It seemed an unnatural gathering of stars, like the Justice League of America or an NBA All-Star Game.

Here was one anchor from each of the local stations – Gerry Brooks from WVIT, Denise D’Ascenzo from WFSB, Grant Hardin from WTIC and Keith Kountz of WTNH.

Usually rivals in the ongoing bitter ratings battle, here they were all sitting peaceably together for an ad prominently shown locally during the Oscars.

Were they forming a super group? A centralized local news organization that would serve all channels? A unified warning about an impending Super Doppler diaster?

No, they joining forces to warn viewers to prepare for the impending digital conversion, set to happen now in less than a year.

Get rid of your rabbit ears. Get information. Get a converter or new box.

Clearly the anchors are serious about this and don’t want any potential viewer to be left out in the cold come the switch. Otherwise why would they all be gathering in such an historic Hartford market aggregation?

I kept wondering about the co-anchors each station representitive left behind. Perhaps Lisa Carberg, Dennis House, Ann Nyburg and Susan Christensen are planning their own spot. 

Bad Jargon

David Shuster, a commentator on MSNBC, was suspended this week for saying the Clinton campaign was "pimping out" Chelsea to influence super delegates.

The comment was seen as part of a spate of offensive sexist comments on the third rung cable news station (Chris Matthews had already apologized for one this political season).

Clinton herself said today in a letter to NBC News President Steve Capus, "Nothing justifies the kind of debasing language that David Shuster used and no temporary suspension or half-hearted apology is sufficient."

In addition, she asked him to "look at the pattern of behavior on your network that seems to repeatedly lead to this sort of degrading language."

Shuster apologized too but in a secondhand way on “Morning Joe” program Friday: "to the extent that people feel I was being pejorative, I apologize for that. I should have seen that people might view it that way, and for that, then I'm sorry."

Aside from the sexism though, the term again shows the problem of broadcasters trying to appropriate street slang in an effort to sound hip and often looking silly because of it.

MTV can get away with titling a car customizing show "Pimp My Ride," but nothing good can come of associating an upstanding young woman with that term. That’s the lesson Don Imus learned when he tried to appropriate street slang in calling the Rutgers women’s team nappy headed hos and getting him thrown off the air -- for a time.

We Can Now Project

We started the day in Connecticut thinking we could finally make a difference in a Super Tuesday primary. Indeed, candidates have been actually paying attention to us, in ads and appearances, in recent days.

But returning from the polls on a dank, foggy night, we turned on the results on TV only to find that the vote scarcely mattered long enough to reach the results shows. Now it was suddenly all about delegate counts, states that were delegate-rich, and the unspoken wishes of the imperious unelected delegates.

What began as Super Tuesday was now about Super Delegates.

With more electronic gee-gaws clouding the screens of the cable news networks as well as the broadcast networks, who had a lot of primetime to fill in the midst of a writers strike, all were in a rush to add up delegate powers as the winning states piled up in color-coded maps or person-high pie charts as on CNN.

Fox news ideologues went all the way Super Tuesday with the addition of Karl Rove himself as a political analyst to a panel that already included Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes. This is like hiring Billy the Kid as consultant on bank robbery trends. How far can a panel tilt right? Sensing he needed an outside view, Brit Hume got connected to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the former head of the Republican National Committee.

You could scarcely see any of this since the bottom crawl was stacked five high with numbers from each Super Tuesday state, their vote totals, the number of precincts reporting, the delegates amassed, the delegates needed, the temperature, time, barometric pressure and the Pick Five lotto numbers (no room for the biggest Wall Street drop in three months).   

But at least most of the cable stations had time to show the full speeches of all the running candidates, though McCain's and Obama's overlapped a bit as the clock approached midnight in the East (and Obama's, no surprise, was essentially the same one he gave in Hartford the night before which may have made a difference in his win here).

There will be days to dissect the meaning of the numbers and the exit polls, the subtle shifts in the choices of Hispanic men or among Caucasian part-time workers with asthma symptoms. But for the night, the reporting of the winners and losers was depressingly similar to the days leading up to the voting, talking not about the issues or differences among candidates but who was projected to win and why, about choosing colors for states on the map as projected winners came in.

Just as for most of the rest of the year-long campaign, it almost didn't matter what the candidates were saying, it was all about where they placed in numeric order. And voters couldn't even savor the moment they might have thought they created, even for a moment. Because now it was all about another bit of number posturing, for delegates and super delegates.

Obama in Hartford

Hats of to WTIC AM for broadcasting live on the radio Barack Obama's speech at the Hartford Civic Center, a speech that mentioned Lincoln and Martin Luther King and one that was introduced by Kennedys. Colin McEnroe's radio show stepped aside to hear those remarks by Ted Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy's as well.

There was an anointment and an electricity to the speeches -- a torch being passed from one political dynasty that inspired so many to a new source of such hope. An event that may stand with among the more historic political speeches made in the state in the past few decades.

Sixteen thousand people showing up on a Monday afternoon for a political speech on the eve of Super Tuesday in usually dead downtown Hartford is big news.

That it happened right around 6 p.m. should have given more than a hint to local TV news that it may be of the public interest to pick it up. None did. Instead, they reported the crowds outside the Civic Center (yeah, they're calling it the XL Center now; I'm not), they quoted a single supporter, they may have even shown a phrase from the speech (but not a full sentence) but they were off to the latest local arrest, minor weather alert and the stuff of every local newscast.

God forbid they stick with the news they'd largely been reporting since 5 and go to the speech at 6 p.m., maybe skip a day's "Inside Edition" if they have to. Folks brought their kids across the state to witness history, yet these stations couldn't dare pre-empt "Extra."

Think there's a fairness doctrine at work in all of this? More like they don't dare to anything to imperil the flow of sweet sweet ad dollars from all campaigns. And if the stations fail an informed public before an important primary, well nobody's paying them for that.