Frank Deford, Sportswriter 
Television
No Show
Two decades after its short run, Newsroom is still the best public-affairs program in Texas history. So why isn’t there anything like it today?
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Newsroom was never a big winner in the ratings game: Only 15,000 to 25,000 households tuned in each night (though the show was loyally watched by whoever passed for intellectuals in Dallas at the time, as well as artsy types, the local political set, and young people). Not surprisingly, KERA’s commitment to it flagged in the mid-seventies, a short while after foundations like Ford began to reexamine the wisdom of funding such ventures. The show went through a series of painful mutations—changes of name, time slot, program length, and ultimately, format—before it quietly slipped away. Conventional wisdom was that it had been an audacious experiment whose time had come and gone. Like other seventies ephemera, Newsroom seemed to be a disposable fad, as meaningless as a pet rock.
But was it really that meaningless? I’ve always believed Newsroom died too soon, that its rebellion against the tyrannical banality of local broadcast news had actually created something memorable. Surfing the local newscasts today confirms my suspicion: Just as Newsroom was ahead of its time two decades ago, it would be today, if only some PBS station could conjure up the money and the moxie to put something like it on the air.
To produce such a show these days would require a good deal more cash than it did the first go-round. The original Newsroom cost about $500,000 a year; now, according to KERA programming executives, a similar show might cost four to five times that amount. By today’s television standards, $2 million or even $3 million a year may not sound like a lot of money, but it would represent almost a quarter of KERA’s yearly budget, according to Yolette Garcia, the station’s executive producer for television production. And potential funders like Ford, Garcia notes, have shifted a lot of their giving away from the arts and toward social projects, leaving only a corporate sponsorship or membership dues to foot the bill. The former might invite interference with content; the latter just doesn’t generate enough dollars.
Of course, money is where you find it, and frequently you have to spend to make it—or in the case of public broadcasting, to raise it. Lehrer somehow found it, and a handful of PBS stations in other cities, from San Francisco to Montgomery, Alabama, have scrounged up enough of it to put on respectable nightly news programs. Executives at KERA lament the fact that while they have been the most watched PBS station in the nation for most of the past year, their ratio of paid members to total viewers is low. Wouldn’t a marquee local nightly news program give the station something new and exciting to peddle during those pledge breaks, perhaps generating more local dollars? Also, inflation notwithstanding, a program like Newsroom is by definition cheaper than conventional news programming because of its lower production values. And the cost of salaries can be kept down by employing, as Lehrer and Cullum did, young reporters, part-timers, and journalists who aren’t in it for the money.
But even if an endless supply of money could be found, there are those who wonder whether the Newsroom format has a place in the high-tech, soundbite-happy world of today’s TV news. “I’m not sure people just want to watch more talking heads these days,” Garcia says, noting that people access information faster and faster today, and from a variety of sources. If something like Newsroom were attempted again, she says, “it would have to be a lot different.” Fair enough. But consider how fresh such a program might seem in the face of the sameness of local news broadcasts. Once you strip away all the satellite uplinks, the Doppler radar, the family friendly stories, and the MTV-inspired graphics, you’ve still got pretty much the tried-and-true elements (auto wreck or drive-by shooting du jour, human interest story, pollen count, sports scores) glued together by insipid and awkward small talk. Even the highly acclaimed and top-rated WFAA in Dallas, while capable of producing the occasional investigative piece, is, night in and night out, a prisoner of this formula. Under the circumstances, something that looks and sounds as different as Newsroom couldn’t help but be noticed amid the nattering of the networks and the clutter of cable; it might even be soothing.
To attract an audience, the particulars would need to be tinkered with. Airing such a program at six-thirty or seven in evening (when Newsroom aired in the seventies) is probably a bad idea, considering the success of its competition in those time slots: Entertainment Tonight, Jeopardy, syndicated reruns of Roseanne, and the like. But there’s no reason a thoughtful local news show couldn’t air, say, during the early morning or even late at night. At those times the market for such a show still might not be any larger than it was 25 years ago, but I suspect there’s a class of local news viewer that desperately wants the one thing the commercial newscasts can’t, or won’t, provide: context. While we have more information at our disposal today than ever before, we often find ourselves adrift on a high sea without a compass; the relative significance or insignificance of different events and their connection to other events is lost in the rush to get on the air first.
KERA’s new weekly program, On the Record, makes as good an argument as any for such journalism. Though the program has been uneven in quality since its debut this past May, there have been moments of near-epiphanous insight during its skimpy ten minutes of roundtable news analysis, particularly the calm, cogent discussion of racial strife between black activists and the Dallas Independent School District leadership—a story that has needed a good dose of context for more than a year. Observing such moments, I couldn’t help but wonder how much richer we’d all be if we were offered such insights on a nightly basis.
Station executives like KERA’s Garcia and KUHT’s program director, Ken Lawrence, seem to agree tentatively in principle, but they can’t get their minds around the problem of funding. “It’s something we would love to do,” says Lawrence. “We’re just not in a position to right now. We’re about to set up a special endowment fund to ensure that perhaps we can do something like that in the future.” Well, while they’re counting their pennies, they might take some inspiration from Bill Hanley, the vice president of news and cultural affairs for Minneapolis—St. Paul’s public broadcasting station, KTCA. For the past three and a half years, KTCA has aired a nightly newscast, Newsnight Minnesota, that is funded largely by grants from two Minnesota foundations. Though the money was hard to raise the first time around and the station is currently in the process of securing funding for the next few years, Hanley says putting a priority on nightly news was worth the extra effort: The program is watched by a respectable 35,000 to 40,000 households. “It’s how we distinguish ourselves,” he says. “It’s our own product. Without nightly local news, you run the risk of becoming invisible, and then you really can’t raise any money.”
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