Bryan Johnson - TV

Bryan Johnson • Written May 2009

Fifty years. My God, it sounds like a long time. No, it is a long time: to be in one city, at one station, in what amounts to one job. I was asked to reflect on those fifty years, my industry, and its future.

I remember how news was once defined and how I defined it. It used to be what happened: North, East, West and South. I never liked that definition. I preferred: “news is information which helps people make decisions about their life, the life of their community, state and nation.” I lived news that way and so did we all.

Reporters covered city council meetings, state legislatures, candidate debates. It was all about cataloguing events and pointing to the options. Government was our beat. Some politicos didn’t get it. They just wished we would go away; they tried to make that happen. So, it was reporters, like Don McGaffin and I, who joined the League of Women Voters, Young Republicans, Young Democrats, and The American Association of University Women in writing our state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Sure we covered more than politics; we covered fires like the Ozark Hotel, Seventh Avenue Apartments, the Paul Keller arsons. But, fires were more than flames; we focused on the why and safety of people. We reported the lack of sprinklers, the open transoms, the lack of fire breaks. We questioned city fire codes including the way wooden decks were allowed on lanais in multi-story buildings and pointed to the danger such construction posed. The goal was not audience but action by those empowered to act. We were watchdogs, not lap dogs.

But sometime in the 1970’s, a San Francisco station, KGO, decided its call letters stood for kickers, guts and orgasms. This type of news, the “If it bleeds, it leads”, didn’t just work, it buried the competition. The TV station grabbed what was estimated to be about 41 percent of the audience.

The die was cast. Across the country, in local news, there was much more emphasis on body counts, accidents and sex. It may have brought more people into the tent, but it pushed the watchdog that we used to be into a special “investigative” unit. Once, all reporters were investigative. Many reporters, beginning as early as the 70’s, became chroniclers of the aberrant. It was still a noble profession, maybe just not AS noble.

TV was not always pretty, handsome, or dazzling. Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, even John Cameron Swayze with his boutonnières, were hardly matinee idols; neither were those of us plying the news business at the local level.

But with each year that passed, info-tainment became a buzz-word and reflected what appeared to be the tastes of the audience. But there still probes of government waste, stories that raised public consciousness about mental illness, still debates about the death penalty, sex offender treatment, flood control and highway needs. There was plenty to keep my interest.

But a funny thing happened on the way to rating success. The audience seemed to become immune to the “new news” that KGO started and FOX perfected. The audience seemed not to care as much or perhaps could not see the relevance to their lives. The calls for “good” news mounted as if they really were good and bad news, rather than just news.

If news did not titillate a sometimes fickle audience, well, there was titillation available on cable tv, and they moved. The reality of news somehow got replaced with the reality of the absurd from “Survivor” to “The Bachelor” from “Big Brother” to why bother. The prized, young demographic was disappearing into a miasma of entertainment glop. Others, it seemed, drifted to bars, pool halls, and Wii’s and away from news. As audiences and readers decreased, advertisers saw what was happening. Newspapers, news magazines, radio and television are all suffering.

When we hit the 21st century, I was one year below Social Security. The audience came back with the horror of 9-11. But the questioning of government, the questioning of government actions, of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which might have been expected in the 60s, 70s, and 80s took a back seat to anger and gut reaction. Later questions surfaced; a new President was elected. But that change and the campaign was blogged, twittered and Instant Messaged into existence. Rather than being reassured by the awakening of the people, I am now more scared than I was after KGO, after the emergence of cable, or after the hypnotic effect of the internet.

Blogging may be the wave of the future, but there is no balance. There’s just a Rush-Limbaugh-style, ditto shouting and a shopping for opinions that agree with the blogger’s. That’s not a formula for an enlightened people, it is an invitation to an Orwellian world. We have all witnessed the tragedy of the death of the PI and its anemic rebirth as a web-based what is it.

I am still in the business because despite all the warts, despite all the emphasis on sex and violence, despite the shrinking audiences, we in tv, radio and newspaper remain the only real hope for a rational, marginally educated people.