Unending Ways to Self-Serve the News

You have to admire creativity, especially on behalf of great literature.

Earlier this month, fertile minds got together at KNBC-TV Channel 4 and devised a way to use one self-serving non-story as a pretense for covering another. Or was it vice versa?

The date was July 10, and it happened on more than one newscast, the main benefactor being veteran Channel 4 anchor Kelly Lange, who had just published a novel.

“I was at an event tonight where there were a lot of guests, but one of them I was particularly pleased and happy to see out and about,” Lange began during the station’s 11 p.m. newscast.

You suspected that what Lange was most “pleased and happy” about was the Channel 4 camera that was lasered to the title of her book that, on videotape, she was shown thumbing through with actress Joan Van Ark.

“The event,” Lange continued in a voice-over as her taped self now glowingly displayed her book title almost full front to the camera, “was a book party for my new novel called ‘Trophy Wife.’ It was held tonight at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club.”

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Subsequently, Lange and her book were joined on camera by actor Robert Culp and comedian Buddy Hackett. Then came the guest whose presence she said had most warmed her--Lange’s Channel 4 co-anchor, Paul Moyer, who is on leave while recovering from heart bypass surgery. With another member of Lange’s literati, attorney F. Lee Bailey, in the background--is that smirk painted on?--Moyer gave the camera his status report. He appeared to be doing fine.

Thanks in part to Channel 4, so is promotion for Lange’s book.

Was it a coincidence? Did Moyer just happen to show up at Lange’s book party? Did Lange just happen to show up at her own book party where a Channel 4 camera crew just happened to be already there taping an interview with Bailey about his client, O.J. Simpson? And if that really was Bailey, why wasn’t Larry King sitting on his lap?

All of this was about as graceful as a dangling participle following a double negative. The unethical cooked-up non-story toasting Lange the author was blatant news chauvinism that could not be justified even if Channel 4 were to cover book-signings for anchor/authors at opposing stations, which, of course, it would never do. Face it, Moses couldn’t wangle this much coverage from Channel 4 for the Ten Commandments.

On the other hand, you could make a case, at least, for Channel 4 interviewing Moyer about his condition, given the carefully nourished celebrity of news anchors. Especially to their viewers, they are VIPs, as for years networks and stations have been strategically molding newscasts around these glistening cults of personality.

That’s true whether in Los Angeles or York, Pa. (pop. 42,192). It’s the damning metaphor dominating the first hour of “Naked News,” documentarian Nicolas Kent’s four-hour treatise on cable’s A&E; channel Sunday.

Kent is the Britisher whose controversial, jugular-pricking “Naked Hollywood” caused such consternation in some movie industry circles four years ago. Although his view of America’s news-and-information crowd is as harsh and carries the urgency of an anchor weightily announcing, “This just in,” Kent infrequently guides “Naked News” beyond the ‘70s and ‘80s. Most of what “Naked News” purports to reveal was bared long ago. And when his program arches its brows over a TV news anchor’s “unquenchable thirst for success” and “insatiable hunger for ratings,” you suspect Kent’s been spending too much time in the moors.

“Naked News” appears under the banner of A&E;’s weekly “Investigative Reports” series hosted by Bill Kurtis, himself a former major local anchor and battle-gored veteran of news personality wars in Chicago.

The anchor hour is followed by a one profiling Ted Turner and CNN, much of it moldily reeking of the Gulf War and dated O.J. Simpson lore. Then comes another on the Limbaughs and Liddys of still-burgeoning talk radio, whose inclusion in a program about news is not such a big leap, given their credibility with listeners.

In some voyeuristic fun, his final hour peeps at that troubled tabloid, the New York Daily News, and eavesdrops on its reporters and editors.

Although the anchor hour rarely offers new perspectives, it has some value as a refresher course in the personality underpinnings of TV news, for those who don’t yet get it.

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Hardly all anchors are news boobs, evidenced, for example, by some recent troubling stories about mentally ill homeless people--ending with a poignant family reunion--that KTTV-TV Channel 11’s Susan Lichtman artfully reported after a reformating of the station’s morning show eliminated her job as an anchor.

Kent’s subject in small-city USA, though, is still in anchor pigtails. She’s 26-year-old Donya Archer, who unwarily complies with the documentary’s agenda, seemingly not cognizant that Kent’s camera is turning her on a spit over a slow fire. For that reason, you find yourself siding with her against the filmmaker at times, even though, as depicted here, her budding career is a microcosm of much that continues to ail TV news today.

The occasion is the likable Archer’s coming debut in York as co-anchor for “Fox 43 News at 10,” a new, “fast-paced, really-like-MTV” evening newscast on the city’s Fox station. Archer is already a giant step ahead of the pack, for representing and anointing her in New York are husband-and-wife mega-agents Richard Liebner and Carol Cooper, whose bag of clients ranges all the way up to Dan Rather.

Liebner tells the camera about the importance of an anchor’s eyes and upper lip. And Archer? “She has developed the most ingratiating smile going, and with a tan on her face she’ll be real vibrant.”

No wonder, then, that Archer is so excited about attending legendary media consultant Frank Magid’s anchor school, which teaches the rules of hair, makeup, wardrobe and all of the other cosmetics that celebrate form over substance.

Although this is Christine Craft turf from the early 1980s--she was the famed anchorwoman who claimed that a Kansas City station fired her on grounds that she was too old, too smart and too homely after trying to soften her with frilly blouses and silly coifs--it’s still interesting to watch.

Magid himself boasts about the “dynamism” of the “Action News” format he pioneered, its title by definition implying that if it isn’t action, it isn’t news. As if to affirm that, on cue, vowing on the screen that “this is a news war, and we don’t take prisoners” is the ultimate chopper commando himself, flying Bob Tur of KCBS-TV Channel 2 “Action News.”

After its debut, the “Fox 43 News at 10” team euphorically celebrates with a round of hugs and cheers. And Donya Archer is already thinking about leaving York in the not-distant future for her first “big market” anchor gig. To say nothing of her first televised book signing.

* “Naked News” airs Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m. and again from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. on cable’s A&E.;