The Evening News Report: Is Good News Good News?
There is an old saying in journalism that goes something like this: "If the plane doesn't crash, it's not news." The point is that news only gets reported when something goes wrong, which goes a long way towards explaining why most news reports tend towards bad news. Last week the "Evening News" debuted a new series called "The American Spirit" that was supposed to be about what goes right: As the network wrote before the series went to air, "CBS News anchor Katie Couric will report on four extraordinary people whose unique solutions to America's problems have had a major impact on the communities in which they were started, but are now also being echoed across the country."
Clearly the "Evening News" was happy with the initiative – "The American Spirit" is now becoming a weekly feature. "It's just a nice break from some of the dreadful news we have to report every night," Couric told Howard Kurtz. As for the stories themselves, I'm going to offer up some good news about the (good) news: Though not every installment last week was a home run, those that worked proved that good news doesn't have to be boring.
The trick, I think, is to make the stories about someone triumphing over a bad situation. That way we get both the inspiring good news and also the bad news underlying it. The best example of this was Tuesday's piece with a doctor who wants to make hospitals safer. We got both the story of the doctor's quest and compelling information about hospital dangers.
Shifting gears, I wanted to note that the weather got a ton of play last week. On Monday, the lead story was about how it was cold out. On Tuesday, the fact that it was cold out was the #2 story. And Thursday gave us a piece on the weather in upstate New York, where there was a lot of snow on the ground. Weather stories are like gas prices stories – people want to see them, but reporters dread having to do them, since there's usually not much to say. Yes, it's cold. Yes, this person on the street is cold too. And shoveling snow? It can be difficult. The end.
We had two major salacious news items last week – Lisa Nowak and Anna Nicole – and the "Evening News" covered one or the other for four straight days. The best moment in the coverage was on Wednesday, when Sharyn Alfonsi opened her story by mentioning the media circus that had engulfed the astronaut: "Even if astronaut Lisa Nowak could go to the dark side of the moon," Alfonsi said, "chances are a camera would be there waiting for her." The worst moment was probably the second day of Anna Nicole coverage. It's not that the report itself was bad, just that it's hard to see why the story justified a second day of coverage.
I'm going to end this week's EN report with a list of my three favorite stories from the week, which I'd encourage you to check out if you missed them. The gold goes to correspondent Elizabeth Palmer's fantastic report about Iraqi refugees being forced to turn to prostitution. Couric's hospital story, mentioned above, takes the silver. And the bronze goes to David Martin's look back at Colin Powell's case for war four years ago, which examined the impact of Powell's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.