It has been an ugly two weeks for TV News. The brief career of controversial talk show host Jerry Springer as a news commentator on a Chicago TV station has received national media attention, but its significance is being widely misinterpreted by TV critics.
Earlier this month Carol Marin, a news anchor at the NBC TV station in Chicago, WMAQ, quit rather than appear on the same program with Springer, whose national TV talk show guests have included men who dress like women, families who strip together and women with melon-sized breasts, among others. Critics were quick to characterize Springer’s hiring as another nail in the coffin of local TV news. Wrong. The nail was driven when Springer announced his resignation last week after only a few days on the job. As someone who first suggested to Jerry Springer that he go into TV, I know he is capable of providing TV news with something it desperately needs; enlightened, entertaining commentary on important issues of the day, to capture the imagination especially of young people whose interest in news is slowly ebbing away, even while overall viewing of TV news programs is on the increase.
In 1982 when I was news director of the NBC TV affiliate in Cincinnati, I urged Jerry Springer, the city’s young, charismatic former mayor, to join our station, WLWT, as a TV commentator. He eventually made the move, and became a smash hit. When Springer left after a 10-year career to begin his outrageous talk show for bigger bucks, the Cincinnati Post referred to his essays as “eloquent…something bordering on the poetic.”
Critics of TV news argue that the lines between news and entertainment are being blurred in an effort to get ratings. I don’t think this is so bad. In fact, there is precedent that it can be a productive mix. Some of the legendary on-air communicators in TV news came from an “entertainment” background, from talk radio or television.
Springer’s rude reception from Marol Marin and her colleagues is not unlike that accorded to a newly hired CBS News correspondent in the mid-1960s, also a veteran of the talk show circuit. At CBS News in New York, where I was a news writer and producer, I recall that the new correspondent was disparaged by his peers as a sleazy Madison Avenue pitchman who, in addition to hosting entertainment talk shows, had done commercials and even acted in a Broadway play. “Harry Reasoner looked at me like I was a hair in his soup,” he joked many years later. The two eventually became fast friends. The correspondent’s name is Mike Wallace.
The dean of broadcast correspondents, Edward R. Murrow, amassed his greatest number of viewers through celebrity interviews on his “Person-to-Person” program, on which he visited the homes of such stars as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. And then there’s the venerable Walter Cronkite. To compete against NBC’s popular “Today Show” in 1954, which featured Dave Garroway and his sidekick, the chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs, Cronkite did the CBS morning news while engaging in daily colloquies with a lion puppet named Charlemane. This did not appear to move Cronkite’s career forward, although he suffered no apparent credibility loss.
As for the critics who say TV news is on the decline, there is no evidence to support this. A research report issued last week by the Freedom Forum’s Media Studies Center shows a loyal and growing audience for local TV new, especially among African Americans and older persons. The amount of time devoted to local TV news programming is going steadily upward, and TV news is more profitable than ever.
The Internet and on-line computer services have not, as many expected, eroded TV and radio news audiences. But news directors are searching for ways to create a relationship with younger persons who do not have the same interest in news as previous generations.
Research also suggests that these individuals are not inclined to develop a news habit as they grow older.
Clearly, the dramatic pictures that TV news emphasizes to convey its stories are not capturing the attention of our youth. Perhaps it is time to try words. Enter Jerry Springer, a skilled TV pundit. By helping Springer find the door, TV station executives have lost someone who should have been encouraged to marshal his considerable intellectual capacity and communications skills toward reaching young people – our successor generation – to get them excited about the world around them. Jerry Springer could have helped.