May 2010

Bombast and Bravado – and just who are you calling “riff-raff”?

Korean News, the public face of the North Korean government offers a daily menu of just about the most colorful propaganda available anywhere. In today’s posting “National Defence Commission Issues Statement” the DPRK warns the world not to take any action retaliating for the alleged torpedo attack on a South Korean naval warship. Fair enough – it’s sabre rattling and diplomats, journalists and analysts closely read these pages carefully noting even slight variations in words and phrases as indications of true policy.

Here’s how they drive their point home, “It is our invariable iron will to react to “retaliation” with more powerful retaliation and to “punishment” with indiscriminate punishment of our style.

Availing ourselves of this opportunity, we sternly warn the U.S. and Japanese authorities and riff-raffs, their poor lackeys, to act with discretion.

The world will clearly see what dear price the group of traitors will have to pay for the clumsy “conspiratorial farce” and “charade” concocted to stifle compatriots.”

Well, I hope their not calling either me and you riff-raffs. And certainly not on a Friday. We might justifiably take umbrage. We can safely presume they’ll have more to say through diplomatic channels but for sheer propaganda, this is unadulterated mastery.

Score 1 for Ethics

This is just worth sharing… Score one for ethics and leadership
NBC STATION IN L.A. ADMITS NOT LIVING UP TO JOURNALISTIC STANDARDS
from StudioBriefing, May 19, 2010
The NBC-owned television station in Los Angeles on Tuesday announced the departure of its “vice president, content” and simultaneously admitted that it had not lived up to “journalistic standards” when it aired a faked report about new credit card rules in February. In today’s (Wednesday) Los Angeles Times, media columnist James Rainey said that Tuesday’s announcements by KNBC-TV represented the culmination of a “psychodrama” at the station that “has pitted traditional television journalists .. against a nouveau crowd of content creators who prefer their sizzle served up hot, preferably without much steak.” In the faked report, Rainey said, the station hired reality show producer Vicki Gunvalson, who interviewed friends about the new credit card rules, then passed the friends off as ordinary “men in the street.” The interviews, Rainey indicated, were conducted at an Orange County boutique, owned by another friend of Gunvalson. A spokesman for the station told Rainey that it is “taking steps to prevent this from happening again.”

If you live by the sword…

We all know them… colleagues or bosses who wield enormous power often based on the most ephemeral set of skills or talents. Many are sycophants, some are pathological, others are deceitful and conniving, but they invest considerable time embellishing their careers, often in spite of their limited talent and acumen, often if not always at the expense of others.

Network news, a business I happen to know well, is filled with such people. There are both men and women who have truly slept their way to power and prominence. There are those who have married their careers to anchors and executives only to be eviscerated themselves, as if by a scythe, when their powerful benefactor’s star has lost its luster.

Last week ABC News announced the departure of long time executive Mimi Gurbst. Many believe the 30-year veteran was edged out in a power shift that promoted those in Diane Sawyer’s coterie and cast aside those who were not among the favored few. Others believe this is a touch of long-delayed justice for an individual who had littered her career path with other’s reputations. What makes all this so interesting is the reaction to this story in The New York Observer “Top ABC News Producer Leaving Network To Become High School Guidance Counselor” by Frank Gillette. Mr. Gilette’s fawning lede and story, heaped with praise and adulation, triggered the most amazing series of comments – more than 100 of them, and none positive. Reading the posts one cannot help but conclude that engaging with Ms. Gurbst professionally was like touching the third rail.

Network news is an industry which often puts its best face on its own dirty laundry and unpleasantries. No where is this more visible than in tributes or saccharin eulogies offered about individuals who were not particularly well thought of even when they were alive. But I cannot recall a public recollection made by colleagues laced with such vitriol and venom. And that’s the lesson… if you live by the sword be prepared to be cut and slashed and wounded by those whose personal and professional reputations you traded as the currency of gossip, innuendo, and disrespect.

In disclosure I knew Mimi Gurbst at ABC years ago. I haven’t spoken with her in more than a decade.

Shoot the messengers. Just shoot them and put us all out of their misery.

Over 37 years of producing and conducting TV and radio and multimedia interviews with executives, politicians, warlords and men and women on the street I rarely believe anything I hear these days, and certainly I believe less than I once did.

Why? Because politicians and executives have been so over-coached and practiced to be sure they say nothing that will be used against them later… it is the equivalent of a hijacked Miranda warning. Say nothing and nothing bad will happen to you. For people on the street they are so ready to tell you whatever you want to hear in exchange that you’ll choose their mutterings for the story prompting them to call their friends to watch or listen.

I have been critical of corporate messaging for a long time. Let me tell you why… when conducting corporate interviews it has become standard practice for their handlers to ask what the interview will be about? If you’re working for a corporate client, you’ll be asked to participate in a “grounding call” that will last about an hour several weeks before the scheduled interview. About 2 weeks before the interview you’ll be invited to another hour plus “briefing call” which becomes the framework for a briefing document for the executive. It will be a pulp intensive document of multiple pages with probably 4 or 5 bullet points for each of the anticipated questions, often with a paragraph of more of embellishments for each bullet point. For an interview of perhaps 20 questions this means that the sycophants who perform the role of communication managers will spend hours drafting up to 120 specific bullet points with hundreds of additional words to manage key suggestions for the executive’s conversation.

The funny thing is that by the time these briefing documents are prepared and delivered to the executive, often on the night before the scheduled interview, it’s frequently too late. Countless times executives have come to the interview and asked me, “What are we talking about today?” I always enjoy the question, as I perversely enjoy watching the blood drain from the face of the handlers simultaneously.

It’s a strange thing. These executives are at the top of the corporate food pyramid. They know their stuff – they have spoken the words before. In many cases, they wrote the words. By preparing the bullets, by over manipulating the executive, his or her handlers have frequently squeezed out any remaining drop of authenticity… the conversation sounds as canned and corny, as insincere and ineffective as imaginable.

Years ago the average length of a sound bite (quote) on the network evening news was :22. Today I hear that’s dropped to just :08 seconds. Is that because reporters are so enamored of their own voices that they insist on shorter sound bites? Perhaps in part. Is it because news makers have less to say than ever before? I don’t think so. Is it then a matter that people don’t say their stories or share their expertise as well as they used to… or we’re burned out hearing the same old stuff again and again… perhaps that has some bearing too.

Here’s the bottom line… why don’t you believe politicians? Why don’t you respond to executives and others representing their issues?

Comment, email me. I am at a loss. What I do know is that you, me, we – the audience generally – is not hearing messages that we believe, that we trust, that we are willing to value… so why not? What’s failing and why?

I’d like to understand this better.

Scott Peterson – a family – a website – a surprise in cyberspace

Every so often an email catches you, surprises you, and briefly interrupts your concentration. Scott Peterson’s appellate website succeeded in doing that just now… 6 years later… though he’s just down the road here in Marin county, I don’t think of him often. I do think of friends who covered the trial, of episodes and moments that we shared in reporting from Redwood City and Modesto, but I don’t often think of what is evidently the continuing quest to prove his innocence.
Over 6 years a lot of water has gone under the bridge and through San Francisco Bay where Laci was found for a crime the jury believed Scott had committed. A lot of money continues to be spent on Peterson’s legal appeal and more will be on California’s tortured path toward legal execution.

His execution will not bring back either Laci or Connor. It may provide some comfort to Laci’s family, perhaps even a twinge of revenge, just as the lethal cocktail will be a burning stab in to the heart of Scott’s parents and his family.

The email did catch my attention. So did the website. And much more.

When they heard I had no money to give them, the conversation ended abruptly.

On the eve of my 35th college reunion I have experienced a sour taste-in-the-mouth moment with my alma mater, Tufts. They couldn’t care less about me unless money is on the table. The contract – if ever there was one between an institution and their alumni – is now all about the money. The original contract – my family paid them for my education so that I would get a good job is long since expired. And for the record, the University really played no role in my employment, but that’s another story.

The background – like many colleges and universities Tufts has contracted a vendor to produce an alumni directory. The vendor obtained all alumni addresses from the university and set upon us like wolves. Emails filled my in-box with increasing urgency asking why I had not responded divulging all my contact points as well as information about spouses and children. They pleaded that I give them what they needed. In fact, on the basis of my giving away this information, this treasure trove of data, the vendor would compile a record that would bind me to my university. In point of fact the inestimable value was to 3rd party marketers, merchandisers, pirates and profiteers alone. Ultimately I gave in… I caved. I surrendered some data in hope I would be left alone.

I was mistaken. This has prompted round 2 — a sales pitch soliciting an order for the new directory — at a cost of over $900! I don’t know about you – but I might care a bit about my actual classmates and a few others, but I have very little need for information on alumni dating to the turn of the 20th century. And for $900? Who are they kidding — but wait, didn’t they obtained the information for free? And, now they want to sell it back individually at almost one thousand dollars? Who’s getting the value of this? The wolves devoured the poor sheep while the University acted as shepherd!

It’s true the famous circus showman P.T. Barnum gave his celebrated elephant Jumbo to Tufts, in turn it became the school mascot. Barnum apparently quoted Lincoln when he said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.” Tufts must have taken this quote to heart… along with their vendor… to think that many (any?) one really has $1000 to spend for a compendium like this. Their supreme arrogance… the bravado of this thinking is mesmerizing. The point is that the vendor has sold a white elephant… only other marketing companies probably have the interest in so much data, and to sell it at a usurious price to everyone who contributed in a genuine effort is distasteful at best.

I did contact Tufts – I subsequently requested they remove me from all mailing lists – and in turn I received 2 emails back from staff who repeated that my name has been removed. Emails which arrived many days apart…

They say an elephant never forgets. This Jumbo will remember! I won’t be sending them any money, now or later, I won’t forget.

It’s time to fight back – to fight when organizations are abusive or people are rude. When wrong, admit it. When wronged, stand up and be heard. The late Congressman and Jesuit priest Bob Drinan (D-MA) would explain why he voted against legislation he actually favored explaining that the means to get there was every bit as important as the result. A great leader, teacher and inspiration, Father Drinan was right. Do the right thing the right way… it’s a good rule for life. I wish I was more consistent myself.

Stand up, fight back, be heard.

Hype only serves to disappoint audiences

News producers, managers and all those create news – the content which is the stuff that keeps the soap commercials from bumping in to one another – seem to me to be more frantic, ever-so-driven to capture and hold their audiences. More than ever before it seems that they too have drunk the Kool-Aide and now piously justify their hype as necessary to lure and secure audiences. Sadly though this is getting sillier and sillier as boasts are proclaimed that cannot be defended, promises are assured that cannot be delivered, and audiences – like you and me – feel more cheated.

It just feels like an era of news abuse – instead of trust – is in vogue and in turn, professionals are defending what is indefensible, hype.

For instance on a weekend report about the death of a University of Virginia co-ed the network anchors assuredly promise “we’ll have the latest on the investigation when we return.” Really? On a Saturday? On a Saturday when investigators are not visible to the media and when there has been no news release from the police. So the latest is… actually, when? Yesterday! And so it has already been… reported? And when? Yesterday! And so the boast of having the latest news coming up is really just a… hype? A tease? And that’s somehow OK… or if as professionals you knew there was truly nothing new, was the hype a lie? A white lie? Or just a plain old-fashioned whopper since it was uttered with the prior knowledge that it was untrue.

Or for instance the Today show used the word “Exclusive” six (6) times about a single guest. Exclusive appeared twice in anchor copy and four times as a graphic. Are producers so desperate to convey the appearance of superior coverage that they cannot let that content speak for itself but must instead wrap it with banners and bravado to drive the point home? Or maybe there is such churn in the viewership that the constant reminders of exclusivity are the only hooks remaining to lure viewers? But if that’s the case then all the exclusives that appear day in and day out are not attracting audiences but may instead be repelling viewers who are tired of being abused with adjectives masquerading as important content.

It seems the corruption of the profession runs deep… as deep as our own self-identity. A national radio show on journalism featured a guest who said, “reporters are now packagers” of news and claimed that he didn’t need to report because he had sufficient “listening posts” to tell him what was going on. It feels a little absurd to ask, but I am mystified because if reporters are not going to report, then who is? And listening posts, who are they… and how do we trust his definition of who is responsible, and ultimately, who is vouching for them? It is the proverbial slippery slope and, whoops! We’ve started sliding.

Another panelist on this NPR program spoke of reporters whose job it was to now contextualize the news. And a third said it was now completely correct for reporters to have an opinion and allow that to be reflected in their work. I always thought that was opinion… not reporting. Isn’t that what Op-Ed pages and Editorials are for? Is the new era of reporting relegating those columns to the dust bin of old journalism too?
We’re mired in the new words of the language – we have “commoditized” news to the point that it is most important to monetize it… even at risk of becoming homogenized content so as not to offend or challenge any one. We are all now “content producers” which I suppose means we are all – as I am here – able to write and self publish, somewhat regardless of our authority or authenticity. We speak passionately of being in touch or tune with our communities, although that seeks somewhat murky and ill-defined. Is my community that of those who are overweight white 50-somethings of general affluence living in well-to-do communities featuring overpriced homes that represent much of our life-worth and that we fear could be depreciating in the current economic downturn? Is that my community? And if it is, pray tell, how is any one going to monetize me?

Look – the point is this – let’s watch our words. Our boasts. Our claims when we really know better. Words matter. That’s my clarion call. Let’s think about the new clichés that serve little purpose but to make us sound au courant and quote-worthy. Adjectives are colorful but when we use them intentionally to be misleading aren’t we all guilty of cheapening our profession? Of course. What’s wrong with reporting being the benchmark of what’s important, significant – the adage: news is the first draft of history?
What do you think? Leave a comment… let me know.

Pay more, get less, be happy

Taxes and fees are rising while services are declining, dwindling and diminishing. Is this a good deal for any of us? Some one will have to explain this to me as if I am a child because while I understand what is happening, and what seems inevitable, I am at a loss to comprehend how some people are trying to spin this as a positive thing in our lives?

Recently Colorado Springs announced it might turn off one-third of all its street lights to save money. I guess this is the same logic that Toyota used in determining it would be less costly to hide defects in lieu of announcing a recall, with all that inevitable negative publicity and notoriety. I think that’s called calculated risk – what a few law suits would cost when weighed against the harsh negative glare.

So Colorado Springs may darken some lights… I guess the first fender bender or trip and fall will be less expensive than providing the public with the amount of light that was once determined to be in the public good.

There was an article recently in The New York Times that subway ridership was down but the cost of running the trains was rising, so the transit agency spokesmen explained fewer riders will have to pay higher fares for the privilege of using the service. And there was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle that Bay Area transit agencies were so bloated with executive’s high salaries that they will never have sufficient ridership to pay that burden. Instead they are cutting routes and decreasing service frequency, presumably creating a hardship for the riders, but no where in the article was there any indication the agencies were grappling with the inherent, underlying problem.

I guess their calculated risk is that no one will come to the transit agency offices with the intent of storming the gates and tar and feathering executives and those responsible.

We lost a lot when tar and feathering went out of style… just imagine…

Look – I admit I do not pretend to have the answer. I see all this as a conundrum. I see the coverage of these stories as little illustrations if fruitless dialogue. The public certainly and justifiably feels screwed just as agencies and governments retreat behind barricades and bromides offering defensive assertions that mega salaries are required to assure they have best and brightest management. The best and brightest – and this is what they have given us? Yet another conundrum.
The over arching system feels rotted. The supporting assumptions and beliefs seem brittle and broken. Let’s call it for what it is – the system is broken and until those in charge step up and admit the changes required are more difficult (and personal) than simply raising taxes and fees while cutting services we will have little meaningful resolution.

Why do the words “Trust” and “News” in the same sentence seem unbelievable to the audience?

Perhaps the problem isn’t that audiences do not believe their news providers, as one recent poll would have us believe, maybe we just don’t want a diet of facts we disagree with or truths that disturb us? Maybe it is that we are becoming largely a nation of self-righteous, opinionated zealots who disagree with any voice other than our own?

There has been a lot of coverage about the recent survey that Americans do not trust their news sources. It’s prompted many news managers to assert their coverage is absolutely grounded in fact, rooted in the inherent bedrock of journalism and the larger audience’s problem stems from reading, watching and listening to other organizations who clearly, evidently don’t respect or even value news, truth, and fairness in the same high degree or standard.

But I haven’t read any one yet who has laid some of the blame on the audience. What, blame the audience? Are they the victims of poor reporting or to blame for failing to demand better? What? Wait! Could not a compelling argument be offered that over the past 20 years the audiences have demanded less and worse, they have appeared to be satiated on a measly diet of incomplete news mush.

Audiences today seem to be divided in Foxes or Hedgehogs, those who find a web source and burrow down (foxes) or those who behave like hedgehogs nestling among many stories or sites picking up tidbits of information that they associativity relate into a pastiche.

Whether that audience finds the right blend of news and facts and information seems irrelevant for they feel informed, and based on a wide array of bits of information they are as assertive as they believe themselves to be well self-informed. But audience surveys show how poorly informed they truly are. USC’s Annenberg School did a survey – both print and TV side by side – of the Los Angeles market and found “A composite half-hour of LA local TV news contains 8:25 of ads; 2:10 of teasers (“stay with us – there’s a story you won’t want to miss”); 3:36 of sports and weather; and 15:44 for everything else. So besides sports and weather, only about half of a half-hour of news is news. How much of that 15:44 is about events that happened in the Los Angeles media market? Local news takes up 8:17; non-local news gets 7:27″ The full document can be found as a link from there.

So what has gone wrong? How do we dissect the road we took that has led to our own dismay and destruction as a trusted source of information and news?

TV News is an industry which became a playground for consultants invited by general managers and news directors in pursuit of dollars. The professionals were often co-conspirators in the rush to expand audiences and achieve higher ad revenue as news became a business instead of a responsibility.

This slippery slope dates back generations. In the 1970s consultant-inspired thinking gave life to happy talk and eyewitness news which were innovative at the time but became feeding grounds for wasted time, irrelevant comments, and ersatz displays of emotion. In the 1980’s live trucks enabled reporters to use technology – some of which were over by the time the newscast began but by-God they had presence. They were there LIVE and again precious air time was sacrificed for glitz.

Stories that were complex were deemed to be too difficult for TV or were said to be “too depressing” for the audience that might be watching at meal time, and the consequence is an entire generation was fed a buffet of crime and chaos. The ‘if it bleeds it leads” style of news still predominates in even the largest markets.

News is partially to blame for creating an audience which has been stuffed on the candy of irrelevance at the expense of substance. A friend says television news doesn’t handle complex carbohydrates well and that’s true. It doesn’t because anything serious or chewy is skipped over with the conviction that the audience either doesn’t care to be bothered with the facts or wouldn’t understand those complexities or the nuance.

Consultants told news managers the only things the audiences care about was weather and traffic, witness the boom in high dollar technology and promotions for super duper Doppler and accurate at all costs weather and traffic graphics that proliferate in all media markets today.

It is easier to watch weather… it is certainly easier for anchors to engage with banalities about the weather in lieu of risking showing ones true ignorance of substantial news matters.

I recently watched the NBC affiliate in San Jose take more than 30 seconds to announce and illustrate a set of 4 new stamps about cowboys on their evening news. The fact that none of them stemmed from the bay area, the artist was a not local resident, nor was there any editorial linkage to the story that made it relevant was, in itself, irrelevant. On any night when there is substantive news to report, the producers chose this story as more important, and it became the subsequent subject of an engaged dialogue between the anchors, as if 30 seconds wasted on the story itself wasn’t indulgent enough.

If the education system has done a poor job teaching civics it is a lesson that has not been lost on reporters who are assigned to important stories without the proper grounding. Just before opening arguments in the 2005 Michael Jackson molestation trial in Santa Maria, California a reporter from the Los Angeles market asked me, “Which side goes first?” They truly had no idea; clearly they had not even watched enough episodes of “Law and Order”. It is a simple thing, and they should have known – but they didn’t – and the amount of other, missing information was daunting. This was a person who would go on to report the trial, assumed to be some one with knowledge, and yet they were vastly out of their league reporting anything but a fender bender. Or new stamps.

Should we be surprised that we have created a generation of idiots? Hardly. In entertainment this is an audience who watches programs such as “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?” Why we set the bar so low, not even at the junior high school level, is probably because we have little conviction the adults in the audience would be competitive if the curriculum was more challenging.

News today is in an economic crisis. Networks are closing their overseas bureaus preferring to simplify and voice over material from bases in London. Former CBS correspondent Tom Fenton warned of the consequences of this in his book Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All. What was bad then (2005) as overseas bureaus were closed and reporters on the ground in distant lands were fired is being replicated today by ABC News in the United States. One cannot cover news as if it is an exercise in distance learning. Nothing can be substituted for feet on the ground, eyes on the scene local knowledge of the people and institutions making important decisions and creating news.

The point is this — when confronted by a survey that the audience doesn’t trust its sources of news is really not that unexpected. Distressing to professional news people – yes, it should be. Distressing to any one who cares about an educated public, yes! it should be too. But is it the fault of news, per se? Partially of course. The blame or responsibility for this is at the feet of a society which doesn’t really seem to value its news, or any one that gives lip service to news instead of really understanding and wanting to be taxed with serious substance, instead of the pabulum that has passed as news for so long?

There is blame for many – for education systems that don’t teach the value of news and information; for individuals who shun anything but infotainment, and then participate in surveys to say they don’t trust news.

It prompts me to wonder, just who do they trust? Who do you trust? Comment or email… let me know what you think?

BP’s approach to the oil spill crisis – corporate sacrifce! Let’s toss our friends into the sea.

There’s an established rule in crisis communications that you round-up your allies and stand together — sink or swim, but both human or corporate sacrifice is frowned upon as poor sportsmanship.

That rule was cast aside Monday by BP CEO Tony Hayward who threw his Gulf of Mexico drilling vendor Transocean Ltd. directly into the deep water saying, “The drilling rig was a Transocean drilling rig. It was their rig and their equipment that failed, run by their people, their processors.”

Oh Mr. Hayward? How do you feel about companies or people you really dislike? In an interview on NBC’s Today Show, Mr. Hayward went on to point out that Transocean owned the giant Deepwater Horizon platform and that BP was merely a lessee. While accepting the burden of paying for clean up costs one has to wonder what Hayward was thinking? Why was he sitting on national television dissing what until last week was considered a valued partner to BP’s global operations?

So much for loyalty. So much for corporate responsibility. Hayward could be laying the framework for a legal defense to put as much of the blame, the harsh light of public recrimination and ultimately the public memory onto the shoulders of his Swiss partner Transocean. To this observer it appears a flimsy and transparent attempt to add to the slimy oil slick also known as the ever-expanding blame game.

Kudos to Mr. Hayward – he appeared sincere and forthright. He was well-trained and prepared. But his statements left real doubt as to the corporate courage and conviction of BP… and I bet the blame will be shared by many more before the well or this story is capped.