TV reporters

When I was a journalism major in college, the media in which students specialized was pretty segregated. I was a print (newspaper) journalist. We had some classes with those from other media, like radio, TV, magazine and yearbook, and they seemed like nice folks. (With the internet, there’s a much bigger push for integration between the media now.) But everyone knew that working for the award-winning student newspaper was the hardest gig there was. 

I usually put in 40-hour weeks while maintaining a full load of classes. I started as a reporter when I was a freshman and worked my way up to editor in chief as a senior. Our newspaper won two national awards that year, and to toot my own horn, I also won 2004 Missouri College Journalist of the Year (beating out several uppity Mizzou folks). I nearly killed myself along the way. My colleagues and I worked so hard to get scoops, expose wrongdoings and tell the stories of seemingly ordinary people who had done extraordinary things. In short, my work at the college newspaper taught me more about the career of journalism than any professor or textbook every could, and it secured me a job two months before I even graduated. But there was one thing for which it did not prepare me: television reporters.

Let me say that I know some first-rate TV reporters. They are bulldogs for truth and have high journalistic standards and integrity. Sadly, they are the minority.

My first introduction to the incompetence of most TV reporters came during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I interned at a newspaper in one of the larger suburbs of the Kansas City metro area. There were three other reporters there, and the awesome editor gave me just as much responsibility as they had. About a month into the internship, I was covering a board of aldermen meeting in a smaller, neighboring town. It had drawn in TV reporters because of the oddity of what was going to be discussed that night: the town’s police chief had almost died because he overdosed on crack that he stole from their police department’s evidence room. I felt honored that the editor chose me to cover it. Seated on one of the metal folding chairs in the gymnasium of the high school, I furiously was taking notes. I wanted to get everything right. Then I felt something on my shoulder. I looked up, and the TV reporter sitting next to me was copying my notes - writing down the juiciest quotes that I had captured. What I’d felt on my shoulder was his face. I wished I’d had a desk where I could covetously wrap my arm around my notes, like you do to prevent cheaters from stealing your answers on tests in elementary school. All I could think was, “Dude, you’re copying the notes of a 20-year-old intern. What does this say about your skills?” He just hadn’t been paying attention. This was before smart phones, so he wasn’t distracted by that. I don’t know what the deal was. I turned to the side so that mostly my back was facing him. I wanted him to realize the 20-year-old intern caught him cheating. A few years after that, I learned he got fired for getting too many DUIs. So maybe he was just drunk during the meeting.

When I started my real-world newspaper reporter gig at a daily newspaper, I encountered TV reporters often. I would see them report things about the same stories I’d covered that I knew were wrong. If I had made those mistakes, a correction would have had to be run in the next day’s edition. The general rule was three corrections = fired. And what happened to the TV reporters who got the facts wrong? Not a damn thing. They didn’t even acknowledge the mistake. On more than one occasion, I also saw my story on a TV station’s web site, verbatim. My managing editor would call the stations and ask them what the deal was, and they would take the story down or give us attribution. But as far as I know, nothing happened to the reporters who claimed to have written them. In print, just one instance of plagiarism is a fireable offense. You see how different the standards between TV and print journalism are, here?

Now that I’m in PR, I often serve as the liaison between media and the law enforcement agency for which I work. We get calls from TV reporters all day, everyday, especially if something big is going down. About a third of the time, they’re just calling to say, “Is anything going on?” Because unlike newspaper reporters, who dig up their own stories, most of the TV folk just want an easy story handed to them on a silver platter. And crime stories are generally easy. 

Another third of the time, they call to ask, “Can you confirm …?” This means, “I saw the story another reporter wrote, and I’d like to steal it, but my boss is making me call you to make sure that the story I want to steal is accurate.” 

Other common calls include:

* The 4 p.m. request for statistics that either do not exist or would require a week’s worth of labor to compile. E.g. “Can I get numbers on how many domestic violence victims were eating soup at the time of their assault?”

* Asking a question that someone else at their station already has asked, but they haven’t bothered to communicate with each other.

* Trying to get a local perspective on an inapplicable national story. E.g. “This one town in another state allows public nudity. What would police do if that happened here?”

From a PR perspective, TV reporters’ lack of enterprise reporting skills makes it easy to feed them positive stories about our organization. But some of them just don’t want any part of that. One guy called last month and asked if anything was going on. We told him about something good our officers had done. He said, and I absolutely am not making this up, “No, I was hoping more for a school bus crash or double shooting. Do you have any of those?”

Let me reiterate that there are some extremely talented TV reporters out there. I know and respect them, and their work has changed lives, exposed corruption, prompted government action and the like. But they are rare flowers. 

Also, this post also only discusses local television reporters. National network reporters are a whole other post. 

Meanwhile, enjoy some of these awesome local news bloopers.