[BC] News in the 21st Century

[Donna Halper]

At 10:14 PM 4/5/2008, Mike McCarthy wrote:
>In Chicago a few years ago, when the NBC O&O here hired Jerry 
>Springer to offer a weekly commentary on it's 10PM news, the two 
>anchors quit in protest and most of the remaining anchors and 
>reporters at the station wanted nothing to do with the concept either.

What's unfortunate is that prior to Springer becoming the low-life 
circus ringmaster with the voyeuristic show, he spent about 15 years 
(you can look it up) as a news anchor in Cincinnati, where he had 
good ratings, a solid reputation, won a few awards, and never did 
stories that were even remotely crude or in bad taste.  When the 
Chicago opportunity presented itself, he wanted to do it because he 
missed journalism-- he was making tons of bucks doing 
lowest-common-denominator TV, but he had a long history of interest 
in politics and hoped to bring his own perspective WMAQ's evening 
newscast.  But nobody would accept him as a journalist any more.  He 
was a symbol of vulgarity and vice, and no decent person wanted to 
listen to him, or so they said.

I'm not defending the guy and I probably would have objected too, but 
the back-story is that he really did have a credible reputation, and 
yet the people who demanded that he be removed were unwilling to let 
him do even one commentary (he resigned after doing only four of 
them).  Okay fine, he was trying to have it both ways, but as he 
pointed out later, while there were all these people who were 
outraged over his wanting to go back on the air doing 
commentary,  his controversial talk show got TRIPLE the ratings of 
the news.  A sad commentary, perhaps, but a fact-- the public claims 
it wants "serious journalism" but they seem to prefer the scandal 
shows and the celebrity gossip shows.