By Michael Cartel
New York City Mayor Gaynor shot with a gun inside a camera in 1910
“What a wonderful picture! Blood all over him – and exclusive too!” the city editor of Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World said when handed a photo of the
assassinated New York City mayor at the moment of bullet impact. The year was 1910, and although news sensationalism was still defining itself, TV’s sweeps-month makes you see that nothing has changed.
Last night it rained a bit. We need heavy rainfall to pull us out of a serious 2-year drought. The TV news slant wasn’t about the grateful rain but instead about a ‘Killer Storm’ that was supposedly approaching.
The networks are under pressure to win or keep audiences (ratings months are November and again in February) and that includes their news programs. The news editors’ jobs depend on creatively rearranging the teletypes.
A killer storm conjures images of fifty-foot waves driven by hurricanes, along with the grisly (estimated) body count. What we actually had was an all-night drizzle. Now, the late news editors were in a bind; there was simply no local violence, gossip or political intrigue at all.
When an editor read the weather report about possible rain clouds moving south, he found his hook to scare and snare during every commercial break. Obviously this needed more than clever rearranging, so the team reached for (the adman’s situational ethics of) the expedient
exaggeration. The next job was writing the story to fit the outrageous teaser. Since the rain had not yet arrived, all that was needed was a file tape of a monsoon to help the viewer imagine the catastrophe.
You could almost hear the news staff congratulating each other in the editing room; “What a wonderful tape! Water all over them – and exclusive too!”
Story borrowed from my Valley Vantage newspaper in 1991 ©Michael Cartel
Same thing this week with TV news dramatizing the L.A. light cold while the rest of the country is below zero and covered under show!