TV news: making the best of the worst stories

Arizona Daily Wildcat Jill Dellamalva

By Jill Dellamalva
Arizona Daily Wildcat
September 3, 1997

You're watching Live at Five - bringing you the latest coverage of the memorial service for the one year anniversary of the TWA Flight 800 crash," the TV reporter declared earnestly.

Commercial break.

As I sat, an intern getting a behind-the-scenes look at the production room during a newscast, I wondered about the reporter I had just watched. For weeks I had observed her preparing background footage for her story about the three day memorial service in New York. The station I was interning with was in Pennsylvania, and not far from a community that had lost an entire high school French club in the crash. The reporter had spent hours rewinding and fast-forwarding through footage of funerals and interviews with heart-broken parents and sobbing best friends. Before she left to cover the story, she told me that victims' families were going to be permitted to visit the reconstructed plane that had plummeted into the Atlantic with their loved ones aboard.

"It must have been so hard for you," I imagined her saying to a teary-eyed family member that had just seen where his daughter's seat had been.

I started wondering whether or not I wanted TV news to be my career goal.

Yes, yes ­ a tragedy occurred one year ago. But why must the public still hear about it today as if it happened only hours ago? Was it just me? The other intern thought the story was great. She said it was kind of like a soap opera.

What I had learned so far was that a good story equaled good ratings. But to me, all of the 'best news' seemed like the worst news. Tragedies were almost like... entertainment.

But all of the reporters, anchors, and producers I knew were very nice people. They were just doing their jobs. I suppose I had never taken notice before my internship about how much news could be sensationalized. The public must have been stunned and captivated as they watched the first TV news footage come out of Vietnam. That footage probably changed the TV news industry and peoples' views of the world forever. After that, crime, war, and starvation were no longer just words on a newspaper page. With television, they formed into images before the public's eyes.

They became reality.

I never believed that most people enjoyed watching others suffer. But TV news slams those images in our faces everyday. They make the viewer almost numb to what is going on. Turn on CNN any day and chances are you'll see someone in a war-torn counrty lying dead on the street with a puddle of blood streaming from a gunshot wound in his head. And chances are that if you've been channel-hopping, you'll probably stop for a moment and take a closer look at that image. Maybe you'll even listen to the minute long story accompanying it before a commercial comes on and you have to flip to Beavis and Butthead.

Then there's the new ratings system. Maybe the networks want to convince the public that they really do care. But do they? Why put ratings on sitcoms and not news? Why could ABC show a 12-year-old a person blown up by a bomb, but not NYPD Blue?

What I've learned in my internship experience is that when there's a minute-and-a-half slot to be filled on the five o'clock news, the story that's the most violent or has the greatest casualties is the one that's going to air.

The commercial ended.

"The kicker (a light-hearted story to end the news cast) is funny today," the producer said to me.

She was right. I laughed. I suppose we all need a good laugh after a half-hour of murders and accidents.

Jill Dellamalva is a junior majoring in creative writing and journalism.