Our Very Own Eye on the Eyewitness

Thank you so much for your report, and we’ll see you again on “Eyewitness News.”

--”Eyewitness News” anchor to “Eyewitness News” reporter on “Eyewitness News” recently

*

It’s not every day that one has the honor of being cited as mediocre.

So naturally KABC-TV is still giddy about the grade its 11 p.m. “Eyewitness News” earned in a 20-city survey by the well-regarded Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Didn’t KABC place 36th out of 61 stations in overall rankings? And didn’t its C top the D grades for quality that the Washington-based journalists’ institute gave its 11 p.m. competitors, KNBC-TV and KCBS-TV?

No wonder, then, that KABC entertainment reporter George Pennacchio deferred to his station’s 11 p.m. newscast in his 6:15 p.m. report outside the Golden Globe awards Sunday night.

“I don’t want to give anything away,” the industry’s favorite lap poodle teased about the awards that were in progress. “But I will say it’s been a good night for vets.” Viewers could discover how good, he said, by tuning in “Eyewitness News” at 11 p.m.

Not giving anything away? KABC viewers should wait nearly five hours? Is Pennacchio in the news reporting business or the news promotion business? Both, it turns out. As are his “Eyewitness News” colleagues.

The source is none other than their news director, Cheryl Fair.

“The best promotion for future newscast viewing is the newscast that is on the air at that moment,” she said in a recent memo to her staff that was made available to me. “That means never missing a chance to cross-promote to another newscast or refer back to when we first reported on a specific story.”

Not that self-worship hasn’t always been newscasting’s narcotic of choice, this indelible streak of narcissism extending even to anchor royalty as exalted as Dan Rather, who regularly crosses an ethical line by boasting on the air about CBS News coverage.

Nor is self-puffery alien to local news in Los Angeles, where:

* TV stations are notorious for using newscasts to advertise their entertainment programs.

* This wedding of news and promotion reached a zenith some years ago when 4 p.m. newscasts on KCBS were ordered daily by management to create stories spun from the topics of their lead-in, the “Geraldo” talk show.

* A couple of years ago, a murdered boy’s parents were interviewed on KCBS while wearing T-shirts bearing the station logo.

* KABC--acting some years ago on research showing its most recognizable “Eyewitness News” component to be its news van, not its news staff--decided to exploit that by mandating that all its live shots include a glimpse of the van.

Now comes Fair, who, hoping to return “Eyewitness News” to its former ratings dominance in Los Angeles, has formally inscribed self-promotion in the copy read on her newscasts.

“Our best vehicle for promoting ourselves is within our news copy in our newscasts,” said Fair’s memo. “Let’s make sure we take full advantage of it.”

Fair suggested ways the staff could “focus on the use of words and phrases in our copy to reinforce our ‘Eyewitness News’ franchise.” Regarding reporter Mark Coogan, whom the station dispatched to Washington for President Clinton’s impeachment trial, she advised: “We could refer to him in copy on occasion as ‘your eyewitness to the impeachment trial.’ ”

She appropriately urged her staffers to “write clear, concise, easy to understand copy” but trumped that by also advising them to advertise “our intentions to make something easier for them to understand.” An example: “ ‘Eyewitness News’ reporter Adrian Alpert makes the impeachment process easier to understand for all of us.”

Fair also instructed her staff: “Never miss an opportunity to tell the viewers how much coverage we are giving them on stories. That means [using] phrases such as team reporting, ‘Eyewitness News’ team, full coverage, in-depth coverage, closer look, etc.”

The goal, she said, is to impart to viewers that “we are your eyewitness to what is happening in the Southland, the nation and the world. Your copy needs to convey that every show, every day.”

Quite honestly, this self-promotion in news copy seemed more than a bit unholy to me.

As a revered TV critic whose highly respected column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times, I called Fair to ask her why she thought there wasn’t a basic conflict in journalists being self-promoters. I wanted to print her response in my column in the Los Angeles Times. If she did advocate her staff’s indulging in self-promotion, I wanted readers of the Los Angeles Times to know it before they learned this late-breaking news in a paper other than the Los Angeles Times.

I left a message on Fair’s voice mail, identifying myself as being from the Los Angeles Times, mentioning the full, in-depth team column--to be written by me, edited by others--I was preparing for the Los Angeles Times, and asking her to call me.

She did, rejecting my suggestion that something is amiss when news media promote themselves, in this case the beneficiary being “Eyewitness News.”

“I don’t think so,” she replied to me, the beloved TV critic for the Los Angeles Times. “We want people to watch ‘Eyewitness News’ instead of someone else’s program.”

Yet isn’t deploying “eyewitness” in news copy for promotional purposes “going too far?” I asked Fair during my exclusive interview.

“That’s the most recognizable thing about us,” Fair said. “We are ‘Eyewitness News’ in this town. That is our brand.”

Fair said she wrote her memo to welcome back staffers who had been away from KABC for some time because of a contract dispute that had resulted in a union lockout. “I wanted to make sure that everyone was thinking the same way on how to put copy together,” she told me for the insightful column on her memo that I would be writing for the Los Angeles Times, giving Southlanders the kind of closer look at KABC they were not getting from other TV critics.

It’s “not unusual at all” for a news director to write such a memo, Fair said.

I wondered if her staff was complying with her wishes. “They’ve been trying to,” she said.

Affirmation came in a KABC newscast Monday night when anchor Marc Brown, presumably reading from a TelePrompTer, introduced a Clinton impeachment story this way: “Eyewitness News reporter Mark Coogan is our eyewitness in Washington, D.C.” He added later: “Our own Laura Diaz is our eyewitness with the pope in Mexico.” That beat went on in an ensuing newscast when anchor Harold Greene gave this intro: “Our very own eyewitness Laura Diaz is in Mexico.”

The message is that in these chaotic, confusing days, you can’t have too many eyewitnesses in a newscast. And me, my paper’s very own TV critic? I’m still writing my column, having The Times of my life.