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You read a lot of pious tut-tutting about Wendy Bergen. Of course it was wrong to stage a dog fight and use it as the basis of a sensational series that would give her station high ratings during Sweeps Week, when the audience numbers are used to set ad rates and millions of dollars are at stake.
Just ask a broadcast executive. You'll hear that Wendy Bergen was an unfortunate and tragic aberration. Every other TV news broadcast is an accurate rendition of events that really occurred.
But Wendy Bergen's pit-bull saga is not an aberration; it is in fact a logical extension of the way that TV news generally operates. Much of what may appear to be a genuine event is the result of staging, direction and manipulation.
Where the cameras appear, there is always staging, direction and manipulation. Here's a very minor example:
In January of 1989, an airliner made a forced landing near the Buena Vista airport. As a sometime stringer for the Post, I drove up there to interview passengers and otherwise flesh out the story that Kit Miniclier had mostly gathered from Denver.
Alas, the TV crews were there. The airport lobby had
been converted into a studio. Notebook in hand, I started
talking to a passenger, when I heard Please don't stand
there. We don't want you in the background.
To some
relieved passengers sitting on a long couch: Could you
move to the other end? The light's better there.
To
everyone: Can you keep it down for a minute? We're
having trouble with the sound.
In short, every action of every person in the small airport lobby was directed by the TV crews, who had total command of the situation.
The report I saw that night was not inaccurate -- the passengers were greatly relieved at their safe landing, and the coverage reflected that -- but we didn't see or hear the real world with its busy backgrounds and dim corners and unpredictable chatter.
We saw instead a controlled environment that was presented as the real, live, on-the-scene environment. To go from there to staging a dog fight and presenting it as an actual event is a difference of degree, not of kind.
It isn't always the TV crew that directs the events which appear on the news. Others often organize the news for the benefit of television.
If you're going to stage a demonstration to promote your cause, it's only prudent to schedule it so that the news crews can be there, and during daylight, so that the light's good. It helps if your speakers are telegenic.
If you're running a political campaign, you naturally tailor it to the demands of TV news. You schedule appearances that make for good video, and you put trenchant 10-second sound bites into your candidate's mouth.
Sure, there are exceptions. Reality occasionally sneaks into TV news. The Rodney King beating comes to mind, and there may be others.
Wendy Bergen took TV news a step or two farther than it
usually goes, but down the same primrose path. She should
have called Blood Sport
a docu-drama.
She
might have won an Emmy, and received a network offer.
Denver's TV news people would be proud to say that they
knew her when, instead of wishing that she would go
away.
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