What I Learned From Jay Leno's Prime Time Debut: Part III - Charlie Warner - MediaBizBloggers

To recap my earlier posts on this topic, I watched Jay Leno's prime time debut Monday night and learned: 1) Don't watch Jay Leno's new prime time show; it's dull and overly scripted. 2) Don't watch prime time terrestrial network TV entertainment programming; it's not entertaining. 3) Don't read about TV in the NY Times; its coverage is insipid and inaccurate.

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Go see the best panel ever at Advertising Week about Sustainability - Team Earth on Monday afternoon http://bit.ly/EDqWE

When: Monday, Sept 21 at The New York Times Building from 5:00-5:45pm.

Panel to include: Peter Seligmann, Conservation International, Co-Founder / CEO; Howard Schultz, Starbucks, CEO; Rob Walton, Conservation International, Chairman of Executive Committee and Board Member and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.; Moderator, Carl Quintanilla, CNBC, Squawk box Co-Anchor.

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At 11:00 p.m. Monday night, after the Leno show on NBC, I made a second mistake. I watched WNBC-TV's local news with veteran anchors Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons.

What did I learn from watching WNBC-TV's late news, "News 4"? 1) I was absolutely right in my decision ten years ago to stop watching local TV news; it's worthless, boring, and old-fashioned. 2) Never watch local TV in the days and weeks before elections because you'll hate all politicians and you'll avoid voting. 3) Someone should wake up Chuck Scarborough and Sue Simmons – it's safe because I Googled sleepwalking and it's a myth that it is dangerous to wake up someone who is sleepwalking.

So, after watching the deadly dull, formulaic, old-fashioned "News 4," I Googled "wnbc-tv new york" because I wanted to see who Chuck Scarborough's female co-anchor was. I got several search results, so I clicked on the top one and got this page, which looked nothing like a typical television station Web site – for comparison, see WCBS-TV's, WABC-TV's, and WNYW-TV's (FOX). WCBS-TV's is the best, WNYW-TV's is the worst.

On the first WNBC-TV page I saw (yes, there are more than one WNBC-TV page) the headline banner was "NEW YORK" in a modern font with no mention of WNBC-TV or "News 4." Underneath the NEW YORK head, in a casual script font, was the sub-head "is laughing about Obama's Wall Street reform speech."

I was shocked – I would have expected this trash from Fox News, not NBC – but when I clicked on a news story to read, under the heading "DON'T MISS," a hardly journalistic headline, I understood what was happening. When you click on a story, you go a page containing that story and to the right of the story is a column headed "WE ARE" with six responses listed underneath: "Laughing – 29%," "Furious – 26%," "Bored – 18%," Thrilled – 12%," Intrigued – 8%," and "Sad – 8%."

Under the "WE ARE" list is a drop-down menu labeled "I AM," with the six emotions listed so you can vote on how you're feeling about a story – sort of like choosing a mood ring. Check it out so you'll get the feel of it better.

So it's come to this: A once respected, now desperate-to-be-hip local news operation, in an attempt to interact with its audience and appeal to entertainment-obsessed younger people, is headlining news stories based on how people feel about them. In other words, viewers' emotional response to news is what counts, not their rational response to a news story's importance or relevance to helping them make a decision in a democratic society.

WNBC-TV has another Web site that is less moody and touchy-feely that features a photo of CBS anchor Walter Cronkite with the caption "Cronkite Remembered." Why on earth would WNBC-TV be promoting the traditional CBS News icon, Cronkite, several weeks after his passing? The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that it is so embarrassed by the moronic pandering of its NEW YORK Web site that it is trying to counterbalance its effect by associating itself lamely with "the most trusted man in America" 45 years ago.

But WNBC-TV's NEW YORK Web site mirrors the reality in television news today – it's all about pandering to emotions (mostly anger), not about appealing to rationality and searching for the truth. TV news has become America's 21st century EST, a phony scam that makes its promoters richer and its victims poorer and further from reality.

What did I learn by going to WNBC-TV's Web site? 1) WNBC-TV and NBC News have strayed so far from the journalistic principles that once drove its great news operation that it is no longer in the news or journalism business; it's in the business of pandering to the emotions of intellectually arid young people. 2) That WNBC-TV's Web site has become the New York Post of TV. 3) I am so grateful for intelligent news and opinion sources such as The Atlantic, the New Yorker, Talking Points Memo, NPR, and Pro Publica so that I never have to watch news on TV again.

Until he retired in 2002, Charlie Warner was Vice President of AOL's Interactive Marketing division. Before joining AOL, he was the Goldenson Endowed Professor at the Missouri Journalism School where he taught media management and sales, and he created and ran the annual Management Seminar for News Executives. Charlie can be contacted at charleshwarner@gmail.com.

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