All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It's notable that the latest development to push the Virginia Tech story forward is a debate over whether or not media outlets should have aired the video and pictures that last moved it forward.

All three newscasts led last night with a note about the growing controversy over the media's choice to run materials from Seung-hui Cho's self-glorifying manifesto. On the "Evening News," anchor Katie Couric opened the show by saying this: "A lot of reaction today to that video message from the Virginia Tech shooter – angry reaction aimed at news outlets, including this one, for airing portions of it. CBS News plans to use this video only on a limited basis, and only when we feel it's necessary to tell the story."

The vast majority of the emails I've received have condemned CBS and other media outlets for showing the video, and today brings a fresh round of stories on criticism of media outlets for doing so. One typical missive in the Public Eye inbox begins like this: "Airing Cho's video was inappropriate, unnecessary and malevolent. Sometimes network news staffs need to think less with their wallets and more with their heads."

One aspect of the debate that's been largely lost in all this is the fact that we're not seeing a large portion of the materials Cho sent to NBC News. As Jack Shafer noted in Slate, "Cho mailed NBC News about two dozen QuickTime videos, of which the network has aired only a handful." The network has also held back some of Cho's photos and writings. Shafer characterizes this decision as "odd restraint," stopping just short of calling on NBC to release the whole shebang. "If you're interested in knowing why Cho did what he did, you want to see the videos and photos and read from the transcripts," wrote Shafer. "If you're not interested, you should feel free to avert your eyes."

Another side of this debate that's gone missing – and I say this with nothing but respect and sadness for the Virginia Tech victims and their loved ones – is a sense of perspective. In the neighborhood of 200 people were killed in a single day this week in Iraq, a fact that has been treated as little more than a footnote in the flood of Virginia Tech coverage.

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I really, really didn’t want to write about Don Imus today. As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock will tell you, the story has been covered, rehashed, and analyzed to death over the past week. (By the way, when was the last time a phrase – that would be “nappy headed hos,” of course – went from invisible to ubiquitous so quickly? Suddenly "show me the money" doesn't seem all that bad.)

This is the Evening News Report, however, and last week the “Evening News” was consistently focused on Imus – well, except for that detour down to Raleigh for the Duke story. The then-growing scandal was covered extensively on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of the week, every new development treated as significant news.

It’s easy to say that the story was over-covered, and not just on CBS News. But it’s not like there wasn’t a lot going on here: Three words uttered by a radio host may be relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but the firestorm they set off – and what they revealed about our culture – are not.

Most of the coverage of the story on the “Evening News” stuck to the basics concerning the latest developments in the case. That’s understandable: This is a show that airs every day, in a relatively short time period, and there isn’t a lot of time to explore cultural issues that aren't easy to get a handle on. Sometimes just getting the facts out clearly is enough.

But with all the airtime the Imus story ate up, it would have been great to see issues like the following addressed: Why did these particular words cause such a firestorm, when Imus has said plenty of offensive things in the past? What does the scandal say about the state of race relations, the ritual of public apology, and the predilections of the media in this country? Are there double standards at play in what is permissible for different members of society, and are they or aren't they fair?

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Here's a rundown of some of the stories that ran on the "Evening News" this week. See if you can tell what they have in common:






Monday: Love At First Flight For Swan And Boat

Tuesday: Coyote Visits Chicago Sandwich Shop (This was not a package.)

Wednesday: Bunny Boom Bothers California Town (And a coyote update.)

Thursday: The Mating Game, Panda Style

Friday: The National Dog Agility Championships (This one will air tonight.)

Figure it out? I'm guessing you did, but just in case: Every day, the "Evening News" gave us not-terribly-pressing news about (mostly) cute animals. (Sorry, coyote.) These stories all came at or near the end of the show, in the period of time reserved for the soft features that have come to dominate the back end of the nightly newscasts.

As I've said before, I don't think the "Evening News" has a responsibility to stuff its newscast with as much hard news as possible. We can get the news in a lot of places these days, and today's "Evening News" has every reason to experiment.

A willingness to shake free from the traditional nightly newscast formula can be a good thing, in fact – witness last week's cavalcade of cancer stories. The preponderance of animal stories this week, however, seems to fit with Neil Steinberg's argument that we are now seeing "the YouTube-ization of news."

That would be a movement towards news that favors arresting images over traditional stories; Steinberg warns that "we [could] wake up one day and Katie Couric is leading the 'CBS Evening News' with a video of a cat being set on fire."

We're not there yet, of course; the animals this week didn't come until the end of the show, and, thankfully, none were on fire. But the animal stories showcased do seem to have gotten on air at large part because they came with cute, arresting pictures.

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This week, the "Evening News" has been dominated by stories about cancer. There have been pieces about prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, and how cancer spreads; also cancer research, the financial cost of cancer, and cancer prevention. And that's not even all of them: On Tuesday's show, to give you an idea, 17 minutes of the 22 minute broadcast was devoted to cancer stories.

There was a news hook for the cancer focus: Both White House spokesman Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential hopeful John Edwards, announced renewed fights with the disease last week. But the coverage still went far beyond what would traditionally be considered commensurate to the news developments.

Whether you think that's a positive or negative depends on what you expect from the "Evening News." If you expect the show to fill the classic role of a nightly newscast – to provide viewers with well-rounded coverage of the most important stories of the day – than the cancer focus might have seemed excessive.

Those of us who feel that the role of the nightly newscasts has evolved, however, see things a little differently. Thanks to technological advances like the Internet and the rise of cable news networks, news today is everywhere – some of us even see headlines in the elevator on the way to work. Nightly newscasts no longer need to function, as they once did, as many people's primary source for news.

That means the nightly newscasts are somewhat less relevant than they were when Walter Cronkite was behind the anchor desk. But it has also freed up the "Evening News" and its competitors to experiment with the format.

Of course, that's not always a good thing – many a media critic bemoaned the "freeSpeech" segment that CBS tried when Katie Couric came on board as anchor, for example. But it can be a good thing, and I think that was the case this week. By focusing so heavily on cancer, the "Evening News" was able to educate viewers about the subject in a way that would have been impossible had producers felt the need to shove as much news into the broadcast as possible. And since we can get our news in a lot of different places these days, the decision to devote so much of the show to cancer strikes me as an admirable one.

I want to start this EN Report with some kudos: Last week's "War Stories" series, in which CBS correspondents told behind-the-scenes stories from the front lines, was great stuff. It introduced a degree of transparency into Iraq coverage and served as an appropriately reflective moment in a week that marked a crucial anniversary in the war. You can watch one installment by clicking on the video box.

Last week also brought us the story of Knut the polar bear cub. You can see that one by clicking on the second video box. Richard Schlesinger reported the story, which was ostensibly an exploration of the "controversy" drummed up by calls for the exceedingly cute Knut to be killed.

The argument for killing Knut was this: The cub was abandoned by his mother. If that had happened in the wild, he would have died. And the Berlin Zoo has an obligation to let nature take its course.

The only thing is the "Knut controversy" was never much of a controversy at all: The Berlin Zoo was never going to kill the cub. Germans are going nuts for the bear, and the comments, by a small number of dissenters, didn't have any real chance of gaining traction. "We never thought to put him to death or let him die," Berlin Zoo veterinarian Dr. Andreas Ochs told Schlesinger in the piece. A zoo spokesman called the notion they would kill the bear "complete nonsense."

The "Evening News" certainly had its reasons for showing Knut: The cub is so over-the-top cute that it's hard to take one's eyes off of him. Instead of trying to tie the footage of the bear to the non-controversy, however, the program might simply have let us know it was giving us our end-of-show cute animal fix and left it at that.

I should point out that it wasn't just the "Evening News" that played the story this way: Last Monday's edition of the widely-read German newspaper Bild splashed the headline "Will Sweet Knut Be Killed by Injection?" on the front page, and many other media outlets followed suit.

Let me start this week's EN Report by explaining my lame headline: The "Rick" is Rick Kaplan, who last week officially began steering the ship at the "Evening News." And the "hard place" is where pundits have been predicting he would take the broadcast, transforming it into something with more hard news than it has had since Katie Couric came on board as anchor.

Kaplan began to really get involved with the show on Tuesday, and it's way, way too early to judge the results. (Although not for this dude.) One thing that is worth noting, however, is something that happened on Friday: A taped hard news interview in the first block involving Katie Couric. Couric interviewed David Iglesias, one of the fired U.S. attorneys. I'm hard pressed to remember the last time Couric did something like this, and though I'm not going to read too much into it, I will say that it's certainly nice to see Couric talking to someone like Iglesias and not, say, Mt. Hood widow Kelly James.

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Public Eye usually focuses on the journalistic product CBS puts out, the people behind it, and wider issues in the media. We do not often address behind-the-scenes personnel reshuffling. It's a somewhat uncomfortable topic for us, for obvious reasons.

But we're going to make an exception for what went down on Thursday, for two reasons. First, it signaled a change in the direction of the "Evening News," one that we think is worth discussing. And two, we've seen significant upheaval at CBS News in the brief life of Public Eye – a lot of people have come and gone in a way that has been hard on some of the people within the organization. And in the interests of transparency we didn't want to let that go unnoticed.

Rome Hartman, who until last week was the executive producer of the "Evening News," had a significant challenge on his hands when he took the job a year ago. He had to deal with a closely-watched new anchor, a third-place newscast hampered by its lead-ins, divergent opinions within and without the company about the best direction for the broadcast, and a mandate to move away from time-tested formulas.

Much of that hasn't changed, and Rick Kaplan, the new EP, faces many of the same challenges as his predecessor. But he is also dealing with a different playing field. The conventional wisdom is that Kaplan has been tasked with making the show less experimental and more like its competitors than it was under Hartman. "The hiring of television veteran Rick Kaplan to run the 'CBS Evening News' is a sign that the network wants to replace experimentation with a program its viewers can count on every day when they switch on Katie Couric," wrote the Associated Press' David Bauder.

His sentiment was echoed by many media watchers, and quotes like this, from CBS News President Sean McManus, back it up. "I think in some ways we owed it to the industry to try new things. But we found at 6:30 with only 22 minutes of programming time, people basically want you to tell them what happened in the world that day," said McManus. The long-dormant "freeSpeech" segment, one can say without much risk, is almost assuredly dead, and will likely not be replaced by anything quite so audacious.

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Yesterday, The "CBS Evening News With Katie Couric" turned six. Six months, that is. The show, which is in third place in the ratings behind the nightly newscasts on ABC and NBC, has been something of an experiment since Couric came on board. The "FreeSpeech" segment, which was fairly radical by nightly news standards, has apparently disappeared; correspondents have come and gone; and Couric has tried to inject more personality into the show, something that has proven difficult within the confines of a 22-minute broadcast.

"I think in some ways we owed it to the industry to try new things," CBS News President Sean McManus told Eric Deggans. "But we found at 6:30 with only 22 minutes of programming time, people basically want you to tell them what happened in the world that day . . . That's probably the biggest lesson we learned."

The broadcast, as Deggans points out, today "looks a lot more like [Couric's] competitors' broadcasts - though with more feature stories, more health stories and more stories with the lead anchor as reporter, according to data on analyst Andrew Tyndall's Web site."

CBS brass have maintained from the beginning that they did not expect the show to jump to #1 immediately, and they continue to say that they are giving it time to develop. "We don't like being No. 3 at all, but I still firmly believe if we keep putting on a better and better show, we're going to see some growth in the ratings," McManus told the Los Angeles Times. "I'm very patient, Katie's patient, my boss is patient."

But no one is patient forever, and there is clearly pressure on all involved to increase ratings.

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It's Monday, and that means its time for the "Evening News" report. Below you'll find a discussion of last week's "Evening News" shows, complete with comments on trends, stories that worked, stories that didn't work, and anything else that strikes our fancy.

I want to use this week's EN Report to discuss the "Evening News'" somewhat uneasy balancing act when it comes to attracting viewers. The problem, basically, is this: Older people make up a large chunk of the audience for the nightly newscasts, but they are not the audience that advertisers covet. CBS gets more ad revenue when viewers in "The Demo" – 25 to 54 year olds – tune in. It's in the interest of the show to attract these younger viewers. But the "Evening News" doesn't want to turn off the older viewers who make up the majority of the audience.

Is it possible to keep both age groups happy? Maybe. But it's not easy. Katie Couric was brought in as anchor in part to attract a younger audience, and her arrival seemed to signal that the "Evening News" would make an effort to reach viewers in The Demo. But the stories broadcast last week suggest that the "Evening News" is still very much tied to its older fans. Exhibit A: The Caregivers series, which focused on caring for the elderly.

Sayeth the press release: "Millions of baby boomers in America are now having to care for their aging parents, even as they still raise their own children... CBS News examines the important issues and problems real people are facing, offering viewers real solutions." Now, this is the kind of series that theoretically appeals to both baby boomers and their elderly parents. But stories like "Elder Care Pays Off For Everyone" are not exactly catnip for The Demo.

That isn't to say that there aren't plenty of stories that appeal to a wide audience. But those stories usually come relatively early in the broadcast. The special features, meanwhile, have a sensibility that reflects that of older viewers. A few examples: pieces on helping the blind to read, health care costs, and a 92-year-old dance teacher, all of which ran last week.

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It's Monday, and that means its time for the "Evening News" report. Below you'll find a discussion of last week's "Evening News" shows, complete with comments on trends, stories that worked, stories that didn't work, and anything else that strikes our fancy.

Last week, the “Evening News” ran a series called “Safe Enough To Eat?,” which dealt with food safety. It gave us a good opportunity to talk about a certain fine line that nightly newscasts have to walk – the one between responsible coverage and sensationalism.

Good stories sometimes deal with scary subjects, and media outlets have nothing to apologize for when they handle those subjects responsibly. The problem comes when news outlets hype stories and fail to provide the appropriate context. Let’s say a woman goes to the hospital because she had an adverse reaction to the chemicals left in her carpet after a cleaning. It was a rare reaction unlikely to occur in anyone else. A responsible news outlet probably wouldn’t cover the story. An irresponsible one? “CAN YOUR CARPET KILL YOU? Find out tonight as we look at one woman’s horrific ordeal.”

So how did the “Evening News” do with food safety? The topic is a legitimate one, certainly: The recent salmonella outbreak in peanut butter and E coli outbreak in packaged spinach are a testament to that. It’s worth taking a close look at the stories themselves, however.

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