Lippman’s Got It Wrong--as Do the ‘Elite’

In last week’s Counterpunch, John Lippman, the recently ousted KCBS-TV news director, looked back fondly at “Action News” as a contribution to Los Angeles and its “diversity” (“ ‘Action News’ Reflects a Changing City,” Calendar, May 17).

Like Lippman, I too found the end of my rope at Channel 2, but I do not look back with similar emotions.

In the years since I left in 1979, I have reflected on what it was about KCBS and broadcast journalism that made the separation one of relief and happiness: The relief came from not having to front for an organization and mostly anonymous managers who bore little public recognition or accountability for their actions, save the ratings they could achieve; my happiness was in knowing that I had overcome my dedication and reliance on an empty dream.

One only had to watch the product and its relentless erosion under Lippman’s direction to fully appreciate what he and his cohorts really thought of this community: incessant pictures of our warts and little else. The shows are a melange of late-20th-Century journalism that seems to believe that if it bleeds, kills or fornicates in public, take its picture or, better yet, if you are the reporter, get into the picture with it; if you are the anchor, bleed with it.

Lippman writes critically of Times television critic Howard Rosenberg and “Westside” viewers who share an “elitist definition of TV journalism” that excludes an appreciation for “Action News.” On the contrary, if there’s an “elite” that should concern us, it is the bosses who run “Action News” and its assorted televised cousins.

Over the years, the characters change, but their power, if anything, has grown from 20 years ago when Lippman accuses them of not accurately reflecting the diversity of Los Angeles. Then as now, the “elite” consisted of mostly anonymous white male producers, news directors, general managers here and their handlers in New York where the real profits are tallied.

The only difference between then and now is that they once had to answer for their actions. Every three or four years, in a practice since abandoned, the stations came before the Federal Communications Commission. In public hearings that could cost a station its lucrative license, individuals and organizations from the community could challenge the renewal. The threat was good enough to force the then “elite” to police itself.

More critically, programming, especially news broadcasts, had to observe two potentially chilling but profoundly effective concepts, the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Provision, concepts that made it virtually impossible for the license-holders to filthy up their news broadcasts.

Lippman observed that “crime is the No. 1 issue in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. We felt it had been under-reported.”

He could not possibly have concluded that from watching his own newscasts. “Action News” offered no consistent coverage of the primary campaign for mayor, let alone any comprehensive reporting of the issues. As for crime, yes, we are all frightened to death of it and this is mainly attributable to the fact that television, entertainment as well as news, seemingly cannot exist without it, especially “Action News.”

The observable truth is that the increasingly degenerate tastes of shows like “Hard Copy” and “A Current Affair” and the subject matter obscenely chewed over day after day by the likes of “Donahue,” “Geraldo,” “Oprah” and their clones have become part of the standard by which to measure the content of local news.

Film critic Pauline Kael once observed, “Celebrity has destroyed the concept of disgrace.” To which one might add, and television news creates much of that disgraceful celebrity and then feeds on it.

The once-feared FCC does little more than play moral cop to the likes of the offensive Howard Stern and the feisty but nearly defenseless KPFK, looking for dirty words while the true obscenities wash over all of us 365 days a year in the guise of news and entertainment programming.

In 1977, in his book “Daniel Martin,” John Fowles said the dilemma was this: “. . . how no one really listened any more, nothing registered, an audience of 15 million was an audience of no one, the speed of forgetfulness was approaching the speed of light . . . all the stabilizing moral and religious values in society, were vanishing into thin air. Reality had driven them, perhaps because they were pitched willy-nilly into a world with a ubiquitous and insatiable greed for the ephemeral, to take any publicity, any celebrity, any transient success as a placebo. . . . The real function was . . . to excuse from thinking.”

In 1971, when John Lippman began his career in television, the “elite” running things at least made a pretense of serving “the public convenience, interest and necessity.” Those of us who worked in the trade then were, for the most part, proud of what we did.

Today, any casual glimpse at the world portrayed to us, from news to entertainment, leaves no doubt that the “elite,” as exemplified by “Action News,” has little or no comprehension of the corrosive ways in which it is degrading a vast and diverse community that deserves and desperately needs something better.