KCRA & the Safeway Meat Scandal (6)
To be completely candid, not all of what we called quality material was of exceptional significance. Also, not all of our news coverage was untainted by self-interest.
There was certainly lots of filler. Endlessly repeated features on ladies making apple dolls. What some of us reporters called the "You Asked For It" approach.
There were also "flak jobs." Some were relatively harmless favors for organizations like the Telephone Pioneers--a service club made up of phone company employees. Paul Thompson had family working for Ma Bell, and he apparently had personal friends in the company as well. I can't recall Sacramento's Telephone Pioneers ever having done anything especially newsworthy, but we gave them coverage,
Other flak jobs were more directly and obviously motivated by commerce. We'd cover the questionably newsworthy opening of a new shopping center, and find the sales department swarming over the place, buttonholing potential advertisers and pointing with broad grins to the news cameras. (The sales department felt that a little ingratiation in the form of free publicity never hurt.) It would be impossible to say with certainty how many of our questionably newsworthy stories originated in Sales.
There was also a certain amount of calculated stroking of officialdom--covering the police academy graduation, for example, even though it happened several times a year and was fairly dull in the best of times. When a major news story broke, you knew who the police would cooperate with most. And when your car broke down an hour and a half outside town--with only two hours until air time--it was nice to have the Highway Patrol whisk you and your film back to the station at 110 miles an hour.
But even with all our questionable flirtations for the sake of sales and official cooperation, the program we aired each night was still more worthwhile than the typical game show.
