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June 04, 2007

CBS Hollers Help!

At a recent meeting in Las Vegas, CBS asked its local affiliated television stations to help the sagging “CBS Evening News With Katie Couric” by asking the “…local stations to transition seamlessly from their early newscast to Ms. Couric's show—meaning no intervening commercials or promotional spots,” according to TVWeek.com.

Of course, this move would mean dropping commercials between the end of the local news and Couric's lead story, which would affect a local stations' bottom line negatively. According to TVWeek.com, CBS research indicates that “a third of viewers decide what they're going to watch next in the last seconds of their local newscasts,” and CBS wants to eliminate any thoughts that viewers have of going somewhere else other than "Evening News," which plummeted to a record low of 5.96 million viewers a couple of weeks ago.

I guess CBS wants its affiliates to share the pain, but not the revenue losses. And the affiliates will probably go along—they are desperate. What else can they do, key out Couric and substitute their local lead anchor? Drop the “Evening News” and substitute CNN’s Lou Dobbs? The jowly, arrogantly avuncular (translation, really old) Dobbs is perfect for CBS, whose audience remains really old (55 plus) and obviously hasn’t warmed up to perky Couric. Dobb’s loopy conservative views would mesh well with CBS’s heavily weighted C and D county, rural audience.

It’s pretty hypocritical of CBS to ask its affiliates to lower their revenue potential while CBS continues to load up the “Evening News” with commercials. I checked out the WCBS-TV local 6:00 p.m. news tonight to see if the CBS-owned New York flagship station was going along with the seamless, commercial-free transition. It was. I then watched the “Evening News” and counted the commercials—a total of 19, the majority of which were for pharmaceutical products for really old people. It was enough to give you the impression that everyone in the US would be blissfully happy if they took drugs, which is probably true, but those drugs aren’t Avandia or Nexium.

Couric’s lead story was about violent crime in America and how deadly violence was up for the second straight year. Couric said that police blame gangs, guns, and lack of money. NY police commissioner Kelly was interviewed and said the Federal budget cuts have hurt crime fighting efforts by reducing the number of policemen on the streets. The first story after the second commercial break (a pod of five commercials) was about the trial of Liberian ex-president Charles Taylor and it showed several scenes of boys as young as eight brandishing and firing automatic guns and rocket launchers in an ongoing civil war.

Now, can you conceive of Couric saying in the lead story, “police and experts on violence say that the increase in deadly violence that the country is witnessing is primarily the result of young people watching violence and mayhem on television, both in news and entertainment programming?” And following up with, “because of the horrible effect that watching violence has on people, especially young people, we won’t be showing you a story of eight- and nine-year-old boys shooting guns and rocket launchers—it’s too tragically graphic?”

The television networks, both in their news and so-called entertainment programming, are in total denial about the violence they have become addicted to in both types of programming—violence is “good video.” CBS News, Katie Couric, the other TV networks, and local stations have no concept about their hypocrisy of continually showing violence and then letting surrogates blame the government. No wonder that TV news has lost its credibility and that young people go to Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” for their news—no violence, just good, clean satire directed at people who deserve being made fun of—television news people, commentators, and politicians.

Rather than blame Couric’s “Evening News” low ratings on poor lead-in programming, maybe CBS ought to look in the mirror and say, “Couric sucks and our news is too depressingly violent. Let’s hire Jim Lehrer, make the show an hour, and drop all commercials. We can do a public service and deal with important issues in depth without showing too much violence; thus, we can beat the competition and deliver great lead-ins to our prime time, violent programming.” But I ask for too much—a new kind of reality television—realistic thinking.

Posted by Charles Warner at June 4, 2007 10:00 PM

Comments

Bruce Braun [TypeKey Profile Page] at June 6, 2007 02:22 AM writes:

On the mark as usual, Charlie.

For all of the years I worked in radio and then TV, we preached to advertisers that by constantly advertising to our audiences, the viewers/listeners would buy their products. Our claims were proven by the results we produced at the check stands. Constant repetition of a commercial message over time (frequency) to large audiences (reach) drives people to action. A fact, unquestionably.

Logic and common sense would dictate that applying the same reach and frequency equation to graphically violent TV programs would impact those audiences to produce similar outcomes.

Try to have that conversation with a TV programming executive! Every time I ever broached the subject with the top programming guys at the networks I sold for, they would hyperventilate. Talk about denial, they sounded like a CEO for Smith & Wesson. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Drive-by shootings, road-rage, gangs...you name the violent behavior and TV will figure out a way to monetize and glorify it....and then deny that any of it is mimicked in real life.


Media Curmudgeon [TypeKey Profile Page] at June 5, 2007 10:42 AM writes:

Bill Grimes writes:

"Completely agree..."


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