A desire to enter into the bigger world "on the other side of the screen" underlay my own choice of a career in television news.
I wanted to take part in something higher and more exciting than the humdrum stuff of everyday life. I also took a kind of misguided pride in having never taken a journalism class. From my point of view, the kinds of student newspaper stories that would-be reporters trained on were just exercises in a process, and almost inherently about nothing of any significance. I wasn’t interested in just being a gossip and telling stories about the drab doings at my school, which the overwhelming preponderance of student journalism focused on. I was interested in playing a role in society’s understanding and resolution of the Big Weighty Issues of the day. In actuality, working as a rookie reporter, I wasn’t assigned to cover Big Weighty Issues all that often. Although this was frustrating to me, it wasn’t completely surprising: it seemed somehow in the nature of things that I’d have to put in some time performing grunt work before I got any really major opportunities. What was far more unexpected was the way I quickly found myself longing for stories that I could simply be frank about. Like a lot of local reporters, I spent a disproportionate amount of my time making things look more interesting than they really were. The assignment desk might send me to cover, say, a ho-hum local carnival consisting of a few trucked-in rides in some forgettable little town off in the hills. I couldn’t very well depict it that way, because then my story would also be boring, and that definitely wasn’t what the station wanted. So I’d have my cameraman get in close for tight shots that would wring every possible ounce of excitement out of the faces of the people on the rides, and get arty shots of the rides themselves, and record the most concentrated sounds of fun and merriment; and we’d put it all together into a package that made an essentially drab affair seem absolutely captivating. It didn’t do much to tell people what their world was actually like, but it was what we were incented to do. The aftermath of that experience is that even today, when I hear a local station being criticized for over-reporting, say, a particularly lurid murder or other story of broader geographic interest, my heart still goes out to the reporters. I know only too well the simultaneous thrill and relief of finally being able to just get the facts out on something that has some genuine newsworthiness in its own right. For my part, I treasured every chance I got to report on things that didn’t have to be in some way “enhanced.” I also wish more people could have a sense of the amount of artifice and marketing that goes into crafting what’s presented as news. To give just one example, in population centers above a certain size, even murders often don’t make their way into the news: they have to have some special “story value” about them to make the cut.
(c) COPYRIGHT 2000 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
