The Media, UNHAPPY MEDIUM

The real trash on TV is not the sex-and-violence the PTA rails about. It’s what local broadcasters try to pass off as public affairs programming. The so-called “Sunday afternoon ghetto,” that two-hour stretch of “community service” interview programs that stations sandwich between church and sports each weekend, is even more banal than “Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes” and similar network pap. As entertainment, “Crossroads of the Seventies” and “Black Forum” are no better than a test pattern; as journalism, they are no more informative than the average press release.

Under these circumstances, Channel 8’s newest wrinkle in news programming, “Evening Magazine,” is a laudable attempt to do more than just fulfill FCC requirements for a certain amount of public affairs programming. “Evening Magazine,” which is broadcast every Friday night at 6:30, grew out of a series of FCC license-related interviews last year by Channel 8’s assistant news director, Doug Fox. Interviewing community leaders on how Channel 8 could improve its news programming, Fox discovered a substantial amount of interest in a “local ’60 Minutes’ type of program.” Encouraged by this reaction – and, no doubt, by the dramatic ascent of “60 Minutes” to the top ten in prime time ratings – Fox and Channel 8’s executive news director Marty Haag set about fashioning a local broadcast magazine program. The concept was simple: to provide a weekly format in which Channel 8’s reporters could develop the sort of investigative features and in-depth profiles precluded by the rip-and-read style of the nightly six and ten news broadcasts.

Unfortunately, after about a dozen programs, ambitiousness is still all “’Eve-ning Magazine” has to show for itself. It’s a slickly produced program, and its format, though embarrassingly derivative of “60 Minutes,” is certainly preferable to that of “4-Country Reporter” and similar offerings from the local competition. The show’s hosts, reporters Bruce Halford and Rita Flynn, are likeable and credible. And the story ideas so far have been good ones – at least on paper. Stories about profits in the topless bar trade, scandal in Laredo City Hall, the strange politics of black conservative Clay Smothers, and the untimely demise of the Piano housing boom suggest that a fertile editorial imagination is at work behind the scenes.

But the program has yet to fall together, either as entertainment or journalism, and the reasons seem to run deeper than mere programming cosmetics. For one thing, the station has clearly not provided its ambitious project with an appropriate budget. Creating a local “60 Minutes” sounds like a good idea, but “60 Minutes” has a staff of 25. “Evening Magazine” is no more than a piggyback operation on the station’s news department: It has only two full-time members, Halford and Fox, and no full-time camera or editing personnel.

This can be a bigger problem than a casual TV viewer might think. “Evening Magazine” requires three investigative features, involving several locations and several interviews, each week. Putting these stories together is a heavy burden on a news staff already responsible for producing 14 half-hour newscasts per week. As a result, several promising features have been turned into little more than extended nightly news stories. Dennis Troute’s piece on the topless bar business could have contained hardhitting material, since such establishments have long been linked to organized crime. Troute is a competent and seasoned broadcast reporter, but he apparently ran out of time: The matter of ownership by organized crime was not seriously confronted, the information on the revenues of such clubs was muddled and unconvincing. Troute was left with little more than the predictable smoke-filled shots of the backs of dancers and the less-than-startling revelation from Dallas police that such clubs “provide a backdrop for all kinds of lawlessness.”

Rita Flynn seemed to run into similar problems with her attempted profile of Clay Smothers. Flynn has special talents for the magazine format – primarily, an utterly charming sassiness in one-on-one interviews. And Smothers, an irascible demagogue, seemed a perfect foil for her. One anticipated the byplay between Flynn and Smothers: the meaty self-revelations, insight into the man’s fears, prejudices, loyalties. But Flynn obviously didn’t come up with any such material in her limited sessions with Smothers, and. undoubtedly facing a deadline, was forced to go with what she had.

Producer Fox readily admits there’s a manpower problem, and that the program needs at least three full-time reporter-cameraman teams to produce consistently good features. But money and warm bodies won’t solve a more fundamental problem: the nature of the television magazine itself. “60 Minutes” has been spectacularly successful, but it has succeeded most at being good entertainment – at the expense of being good journalism. For the most part, its “investigative” pieces have become little more than cleverly edited attempts at generating controversy for its own sake; its “in-depth” profiles are slick and superficial -journalism only in the sense that People magazine is journalism. The objective of “60 Minutes,” like that of People, seems to be more to titillate than to inform.

The show’s sensationalism wouldn’t be so bothersome if it weren’t for its increasingly cynical exploitation of journalism-as-entertainment. Watching Mike Wallace getting thrown out of some bureaucrat’s office can be entertaining TV, but it’s usually used as a means of pumping up an otherwise tired investigative feature. In the course of such shuffling about, the viewer loses touch with the facts of the story. The process of doing journalism becomes the story. And since you can’t re-read TV, you’re left with the impression that you’ve been informed on a particular topic, when in fact you’ve only been momentarily diverted.

“Evening Magazine’s” inclination toward the same kind of gimmickry is a more serious problem than its inadequate budget and staff. One of the program’s best stories to date – an overview of the corruption in the Laredo City Hall by reporter Charles Duncan – was cheapened by Duncan’s unnecessary encounter with the wife of a city official allegedly involved in the scandal. The segment served only to overstate the modest fact that the official in question didn’t want to talk to Duncan.

A different kind of subject, Bruce Hal-ford’s feature on the Sex Pistols’ visit to Dallas, exploited TV’s ability to make you believe you’re being told something when in fact you’re only being shown something. The temptation to parade the fad of the day across the screen – no matter how unimportant it may be – was obviously too great for “Evening Magazine’s” producers: Anything that’s popular means better ratings. Halford had no story, and even a last minute stab at sociology failed: Halford tried doggedly to coax some sense of punk rock’s attraction out of a handful of interviewees, but wound up with only “Some like ’em, some don’t.”

This is not to suggest that “Evening Magazine” should wholly ignore entertainment in developing its weekly content. Trying to ignore it produces the kind of torpor that Channel I3’s succession of local programming flops descended into in recent years. Entertainment has its place in journalism, but it can’t be substituted for journalism. The special attraction of the magazine – whether print or broadcast – is that it both entertains and informs. Contemporary media theory notwithstanding, this has always been easier to do in print than on TV. Print can communicate ideas and emotions as easily as it can convey facts. It can provoke as well as inform. It is bound only by the limitations of the writer’s imagination and the reader’s patience.

TV, in comparison, often seems a hopelessly limited medium. Finally, it is bound to what it can photograph, at the expense of ideas. This can be an enormous problem in magazine journalism, which succeeds or fails according to its ability to go beyond the fact of the matter. “Evening Magazine’s” most promising story to date was sabotaged by this shortcoming. Byron Harris, probably the best reporter the station has to offer in the magazine format, had got wind of a significant shift in the suburban housing market. The real estate bonanza in Piano had suddenly turned sour, for both homebuyers and homebuilders. Runaway building had produced increasingly shoddy workmanship, according to homebuyers. The builders, for their part, had found that fast bucks can also mean fast debts. Good stuff.

Harris dutifully tracked down and interviewed some disgruntled homeowners, and he put together precise and convincing statistics on the matter. But the story fell apart when he tried and failed to get a key homebuilder on camera. Instead the camera found Harris standing awkwardly in front of the builder’s office, explaining as best he could why the builder wouldn’t talk to him. A writer could easily have “written around” such a hole, told the builder’s story with or without his cooperation. Harris enjoyed no such luxury: What he knew didn’t matter; what he could photograph did.

To his credit, producer Fox seems to understand the entertainment trap, and the limitations of television when it comes to magazine journalism. “Ideally,” he says, “I want the show to be all solid investigative journalism – the sort of stuff we can’t do on the nightly shows because of time. But you have to be careful with your story selection. Government scandals and such can be good investigative journalism, but many of them involve fine lines of ethics. How do you photograph ethics?” And the program’s initial ratings indicate that the marketplace may give him the time to find the right formula: “Evening Magazine” scored an eleven rating its first two weeks on the air – three times the audience of the typical non-nightly news local program and only a point shy of the rating for “Bowling for Dollars.”

Finding that formula will involve more than simply improving the imitation of “60 Minutes”; it will require improvising on the format. Finally, Channel 8 will have to decide journalism comes first, and find a way to make it work. This will be difficult, but not altogether impossible: PBS, for all its faults, has produced some interesting broadcast magazine formats that avoid the entertainment trap while remaining watchable. The “Mac-Neil-Lehrer Report.” “Washington Week in Review.” and “Bill Moyers’ Journal” all succeeded where “60 Minutes” fails because they recognized TV’s weaknesses – and strengths – when it comes to magazine journalism. Specifically, they capitalized on television’s unique ability to capture and convey the live, unrehearsed conversation – a technique which can entertain as well as inform.

The broadcast magazine program is probably the most underdeveloped format in television news: In some sense, while the success of “60 Minutes” has prodded the rest of television to experiment with news programming, it has also limited the range of that experimentation. TV remains a prisoner of “doing what works.” One can only hope Channel 8 finds a way for “Evening Magazine” to “work” by living up to its ambitions, rather than discarding them.