Looking at television news, you could reasonably arrive at the ridiculous conclusion that people almost never talk about books, movies, television or theater.
You could come away believing that at parties and over lunch, the arts never come up at all, that they are at best tangents to life and rather less important than conflagrations in distant states or cute things animals do.
Television news has many habits that send occasional viewers to newspapers or National Public Radio in exasperation, but one of its most perplexing mistakes, on both the local and national levels, has been its virtual failure to acknowledge this most vital aspect of existence, the glass through which we interpret what it means to be human.
Content analyses of both local and national TV news show that arts coverage, even a loose interpretation of what constitutes arts coverage, merits merely a nod in the average newscast, especially the ostensibly more serious newscasts that air later in the day.
The one prominent exception to this, of course, is coverage of the arts in the form of television programs that just happened to air that night on the station’s own network. CBS-owned WBBM-Ch. 2 has been quite vigorous, if somewhat less than skeptical, in its chronicling of CBS’ “Survivor,” for instance.
Meanwhile, television news directors scratch their heads and wonder why they’ve had steadily shrinking ratings, a 25 percent decline for the three network newscast in the past decade, a drop-off of 33 percent in that same time period for the local 10 p.m. newscasts.
TV-news arts coverage “doesn’t exist,” says Carl Gottlieb, a former TV newsman who is deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington-based watchdog group. “And it should exist because it’s part of, really, the fabric of society and as much a part of our lives as politics and everything else that we need information on to make good decisions. Give me a few less water-skiing squirrels, and give me a couple of minutes of a movie review at the end of the week.”
An exception is PBS’ nightly “NewsHour” program. “I just think it’s news,” says anchor Jim Lehrer, one of TV news’ rare patrons of the arts story. “I think anything that affects the mind and the spirit is news, and the arts are an essential part of our lives. You cannot escape the arts.”
The “NewsHour” will sometimes go so far as to use a poem as a counterpoint to a news story, as when former poet laureate Robert Pinsky read lines about exploration from Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen”following a report on a robot mission to Mars.
“We occasionally get somebody who’ll say, `C’mon. Poetry ain’t news.’ And I write ’em back and say, `Well, it is here. Sorry,”‘ says Lehrer.
At Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program, the 2000 report “Television and The Arts” took a quantitative look at how much arts coverage the three major-network evening newscasts provided during the 1990s.
30 seconds per newscast
Using a database maintained by study co-author Andrew Tyndall, and applying an inclusive definition of what constituted arts coverage (the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman breakup would count), the study still came up with an average of only 30 seconds per newscast. And that, remember, is for telecasts that do not, like local newscasts, have sports and weather grabbing about one-fourth of the roughly 23 non-commercial minutes available.
Those findings echoed the figures in a 1998 study I did of four weeks worth of 10 p.m. newscasts on Chicago’s three major-network stations. Arts coverage during the November 1997 survey period averaged 22 seconds per local newscast, a figure that would have been substantially smaller were it not for James Ward’s long weekly restaurant reviews on WLS.
“The news media are essentially filtering out a tremendous amount of this rich cultural material, and in this society if it’s not in the media, it’s essentially a tree-falls-in-the-forest situation,” says Andras Szanto, co-author of the study for Columbia’s arts journalism program, where he is deputy director. “Is sports important because there is a lot of it on TV, or is there a lot of it on TV because sport is important?”
Szanto’s report found arts coverage actually decreasing slightly during the 1990s, apparently giving way to coverage of Internet topics such as Napster and eBay. (The full study is available at www.najp.org.)
“These are undeniably important stories,” he says, “but they have to some extent cannibalized the precious few seconds of traditional arts coverage that were available.”
Even mass-appeal art forms such as movies and pop music, whose popularity is demonstrated daily at cash registers and on magazine covers, merit TV coverage more for the behaviors and misbehaviors of their celebrities, or for the battles over prizes, or the big-dollar figures involved in, say, weekly box-office reports than for the meaning of the art itself.
The three network newscasts during the 1990s gave the third most arts-coverage time to Michael Jackson’s sex life, second to the Academy Awards ceremonies and first to sex and violence on television, according to “Television and the Arts.”
While art is often a unifying force, the coverage emphasis is on those places where it is divisive, controversial, competitive.
There are implications to the lack and tabloid style of coverage beyond hurt feelings at a struggling local theater or potential misperceptions by aliens. When the arts don’t get covered, there is the threat that people — including, say, the politicians who control arts funding — will see them as tangential.
News slow to catch on
“It used to be said that America’s business is business, but now America’s business is culture,” says Szanto. “That realization hasn’t completely dawned on news directors yet. It’s still seen as a frivolous kind of thing.”
A number of factors conspire to create this coverage vacuum. Probably the strongest is, as Szanto suggests, the traditional mind-set of TV newsrooms, where anything that doesn’t involve death or politics is seen as “soft,” where the emphasis is on doing things the way they have always been done, and where the mentality leans toward the populist.
“There is a mind-set that needs to be worked on a bit,” says Jim Lehrer, “that arts are a special category, that they’re only for the, quote, elite.”
Which is a silly notion, says the poet Robert Pinsky, but one that contributes to the standoff. “I don’t think television is automatically dumb or poetry is automatically smart,” he says. “It’s as possible to do a brilliant TV series as it is to do a stupid poem.”
TV news budgets have been shrinking over the years, too, and one of the first to go is the entertainment reporter.
“It’s sometimes tough with the manpower available to cover these areas,” allows Frank Whittaker, vice president of news at WMAQ. “These are not lead stories. But I do think they are stories that bring people in to watch over a period of time.”
To that end, Whittaker recently added an entertainment reporter, former radio personality Jeanne Sparrow, and, in addition to using her extensively in morning news, often features her reports on the station’s 10 p.m. marquee newscast each Friday.
It’s a step forward from what Whittaker says was a near absence of arts coverage, but the real advance will come when TV newsrooms realize arts is about more than the question of what to do this weekend.
Always lurking in television coverage decisions is the question of time. “Where do you put it?” asks Gottlieb of arts coverage. “Do you take time from sports? Do you take it from weather?”
Expendable features
In a word, yes. Good idea. Weather could be reduced to the sandals-or-galoshes essentials. Sports always gets a seat at the table because it has always gotten a seat at the table, but 60 percent of local news viewers are women, and news directors all have research showing that their newscasts lose viewers when sports comes on. Rather than trying to appeal to female viewers with sweeps-month “special reports” on which pantyhose are best, why not do it with regular reports on arts?
Another factor — a profound one — limiting arts coverage is TV news’ fear of the idea. NPR, where news programs feature extensive forays into the arts, loves presenting ideas. Newspapers and magazines thrive on them, and most employ actual critics. But television news is much better at presenting events, showcasing footage. To make arts coverage really come alive, you have to be able to engage with the ideas the work presents, not just send a camera down to the performance hall to get a few seconds of video.
But a lot of it, too, is just emphasis. The NAJP study found that ABC devoted significantly more time than its network rivals to arts coverage. Somebody there, apparently, simply decided that arts were important and tried to make sure they got covered.
To decry the state of arts coverage on TV news is in no way to imply that there is not good arts coverage on television. It tends to happen in less prominent places.
Entire cable channels, of course, have arisen devoted to the arts, such as Bravo, Ovation and, to a lesser degree, A&E.
The network newsmagazines frequently profile arts-and-entertainment celebrities, and PBS’ Charlie Rose will conduct long conversations with arts-world people just because they’re interesting. Network morning shows make room for stars, too, and sometimes even authors. “CBS Sunday Morning,” with its thoughtful tone and anti-celebrity bent, is the best source for television arts coverage, says Lehrer.
On the local level, the leader far and away is the PBS outlet WTTW-Ch. 11. While WLS and WMAQ produce weekly, arts-heavy half-hour shows (“190 North” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” respectively), WTTW showcases performances in frequent specials and covers the (mostly “high”) arts in a weekly newsmagazine, “Artbeat Chicago.” More mainstream art tends to be featured in WTTW’s “Wild Chicago” newsmagazine. And the nightly “Chicago Tonight” show delves regularly into cultural issues.
Worth noting, too, are the efforts of local cable outlet CLTV. The Tribune Co.-owned station is surely one of the few in the nation to regularly feature the work of arts critics and writers (this one included) from the Tribune’s staff. Skeptics can argue that it’s simply a case of a low-budget station happy to accept content that doesn’t cost it money, or of a dutiful corporate sibling eager to promote its partner, but CLTV airwaves do feature moderately serious discussion of plays, films and television shows.
Challenge for newscasts
The challenge, then, is for more prominent newscasts to bring some of that same perspective to their own slices of the airwaves. A frequent and justified complaint of TV news viewers is that the newscasts are numbingly similar to one another. So let one of them emphasize arts over, say, sports, and see if some of those disappearing viewers can be brought back. Let them stop talking down to viewers, instead giving people credit for being able to handle the ideas presented in, say, a movie review.
It is hard to imagine the TV viewer who would not be delighted by the kind of juxtaposition Pinsky was involved in during a “NewsHour” telecast.
“The stock market took a dip,” the poet recalls, “and Jim said, `And now some stock-market poetry.’ And I read Robert Frost’s `Provide, Provide,’ which does have the phrase `stock exchange’ in it.”
Pinsky quotes from memory: “`Make the whole stock exchange your own! / If need be occupy a throne, / Where nobody can call you crone . . . ‘”
What made the cut
The top 10 “arts” stories, loosely defined, covered on the evening network newscasts in the 1990s.
1. Television sex and violence (190 minutes)
2. Academy Awards ceremonies (140)
3. Michael Jackson’s sex life (74)
4. Gangsta rap lyrics (64)
5. Frank Sinatra’s obituary (62)
6. The Beatles profiled (58)
7. Elvis Presley remembered (49)
8. Hollywood movie box-office trends (43)
9. Daytime TV talk-show controversies (42)
10. Violent computer video games (39)
Source: “Television and the Arts,” report by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University
