Media Critics: A Shrinking TV Fraternity

I used to watch media critic Ron Powers on “CBS News Sunday Morning” with dread and anticipation.

The dread came from knowing there was a good chance that Powers would make a wise observation about something important that I had failed to notice, something I should have written about but didn’t.

The anticipation came from knowing that whatever he did, it would be very, very good.

On both counts, I was rarely disappointed.

Powers, who became the first TV critic to win a Pulitzer Prize when he was with the Chicago Sun-Times, spent five years on “CBS News Sunday Morning” before packing it in last month and turning his attention toward a book he is writing about towns and a career in teaching. He’ll still contribute to “CBS News Sunday Morning” occasionally, he said.

The void he leaves is enormous--an electronic black hole.

Think about it: Our most powerful communications medium now has no one on a national level regularly tracking the performance of our most powerful communications medium.

Powers is still a better writer than TV talker. Yet the level of his delivery, camera ease and video fluency rose dramatically through the years, giving his valuable, often-profound, insights even greater worth.

“I don’t think that what I did was all that wonderful,” Powers said by phone from New York, offering one of his least valid critiques.

Powers could go small picture or big picture. He sensed and made sense of the interdependence of media and society. He was an essayist of grace and eloquence at CBS, helping pioneer a highly specialized TV idiom, tapping issues ranging from children’s television to news coverage. In a very broad sense, moreover, he made his mark while gnawing the hand that signed his paychecks.

“There are problems being a network critic being paid by a network,” he said. “There’s the sense that you’re criticizing colleagues and touching on vested interests, whether it’s true or not. But I was relatively free to say what I wanted. I always wrote (his TV essays) as an outsider. I never liked to become part of the infrastructure.”

Powers also worked at various times for TV in Chicago, “The CBS Morning News” and “Entertainment Tonight.” However, his appearances on “CBS News Sunday Morning”--for years the nation’s only electronic Sunday newspaper--delivered him to the viewers probably most receptive to his thoughtful media analysis.

“The unfortunate thing about media criticism is that it tends to be put out in channels where you preach to the converted,” he said. “For the mass audience--people who just sort of tune in and let it wash over them--there isn’t that kind of access.”

That mass audience is getting a taste of media criticism on TV in Los Angeles, where Eric Burns is one of a kind.

The arena is the 10 p.m. Fox News on KTTV Channel 11, where Burns--a former NBC News correspondent and “Entertainment Tonight” contributor--performs verbal lobotomies on almost any media topic you can think of. He operates with precision, clarity and a straight-faced wit that bounces between elegant and lethal.

Burns is one of those rare TV birds who not only is camera literate but, as a bonus, also has something important to say.

On mixing hair and foreign affairs: “Jane Fonda went to North Vietnam. Kris Kristofferson went to Central America. And now, Vidal Sassoon has gone to the Middle East. That’s right--Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser.”

It’s not that Burns minded Sassoon visiting Israel. That’s Sassoon’s right. But Burns took issue with United Press International later quoting Sassoon on the Middle East.

Such “celebrity glorification” trivializes important issues, said Burns, telling Channel 11 viewers: “Sassoon could spend a month in the Middle East and I still wouldn’t want to hear anything more from him than how to keep my hair manageable when it’s this short.”

The rumor going around is that Sassoon has offered to give Burns a free haircut--with a meat cleaver.

Burns has labeled “sneaky” those home videos that contain unannounced commercials, saying they remind him of “something that used to happen in the United States back in the 1920s.” Whereupon he recounted how in some drugstores, “tables of special merchandise were placed in the aisles directly in the paths of customers, so that the customers--and I’m quoting here from the magazine Printer’s Ink--’will be attracted to the articles when they fall over the table, bump into it and kick their shins upon it.’ ”

Meanwhile, Burns mocked local TV and tabloid stories quoting hard-core Elvis Presley loyalists who contend that The King faked his death and is alive. To make his point, Burns conducted his own “exclusive” interview with Elvis, via an old clip. The King had little to say.

Nor did Burns like Jerry Falwell’s paid TV pitches on CNN urging a pardon of Oliver North and declaring: “Ollie North is innocent!” Burns suggested that Falwell be allowed to decide the guilt or innocence of everyone accused of a crime. That would not only eliminate crowded courts, he said, but, even better, it would eliminate the need for courts.

The tone is humorous, the message serious and the messenger a valuable addition to local news.

“I think there is a hunger out there,” Ron Powers said about media commentary on TV. “I think there is a hunger out there for thoughtful, impassioned witness, with a point of view.”

Unfortunately, Powers is no longer feeding the hunger. Fortunately, Burns is.