Tenuous Hope for ‘Local News’

Los Angeles is infamous for its androids of local news. Yet here’s a nourishing thought.

Is it possible that behind the automated heehawing, crime-busting, team-covering, truth-fudging, headline-belching theater of these newscasts some warmblooded humans lurk? You know, actual thinking, caring individuals as interested in serving the public as their careers? A few high-minded revolutionaries hoping some day to win control of news operations from the glib Hollywood Squares? Or is the subject of “Local News ... One station fights the odds ... “ some sort of weird aberration, a rare green speck in a barren moonscape?

The setting for this smart, stunningly candid, even hopeful new documentary series is Charlotte, N.C. The station is WCNC-TV, an NBC affiliate whose underdog “6 News” ranked a poor third in the ratings when Lumiere Productions arrived in 1999 to begin 10 months of intimate taping for this PBS program.

Sprawling five 60-minute segments, the results are quietly cosmic, no thunderbolts but a steadily delivered message that “doing the right thing” is occasionally possible amid tenacious drives for ratings and the target audiences most prized by advertisers.

TV news on every level is a racetrack, substance and ethics usually getting lapped by sound bites and speed. Especially notable here, though, are the pit stops captured, as some WCNC staffers and their boss weigh options and the consequences of coverage with a sensitivity that belies the stereotype of news predators on the prowl for fresh meat.

“If you practice good journalism, you can still win,” says WCNC’s young news director, Keith Connors, so earnestly that you just have to believe he’s sincere. Yet getting the opportunity to practice it is an eternal struggle.

“6 News” will be “a major contender” in Charlotte, predicts disillusioned news producer Wanda Johnson Stokes at the end of Episode 1. “What scares me is the way they’re gonna get there.”

Compromise would be the norm, for the Holy Grail is nearly always ratings and the benefits they bring. This is an industry of falling dominoes, after all, where idealism inevitably bows to expedience followed by cynicism. And where frantic, insecure news directors jump through flaming hoops to survive, knowing that tenure in these volatile jobs rarely exceeds two years.

“If this is only about a number to get a rating, to get a dollar, then it’s a shallow, meaningless pursuit,” says Connors, shown here to be a very decent fellow. Yet one also whose good intentions at times give way to pragmatism under the pressure of competing for viewers against stations with larger staffs and greater resources.

It’s Connors who admirably rules against gratuitous “special reports” that may panic Charlotte regarding a possible bombing related to the city’s ongoing school busing/desegregation case that threads these five hours. “You need to have a moral code,” he says. “You don’t tease the tragedy of it all.”

It’s Connors, too, who defies convention by ordering a half-hour news special examining the case, knowing the low ratings potential (it draws a minuscule 1% of the available audience). But it’s also Connors who imposes the “team coverage” that limits involvement by the station’s able education reporter, Sterlin Benson Webber, at a critical moment. “I don’t have any idea who these people are,” acknowledges another reporter assigned to a press conference on Webber’s beat.

And more ominously, it’s under Connors’ watch that his station, facing slow growth in “6 News” ratings, starts ballooning its crime coverage as the documentary begins winding down.

Earlier he had vowed “murder and mayhem” were unnecessary to attract viewers. Yet M&M; it will be, obviously, after an executive from A.H. Belo Corp., the media company that owns WCNC, proclaims that “local means crime.”

“Local News” is also about dreams realized, and dreams dashed right in front of the lens. Executive producers Calvin Skaggs and David Van Taylor use fruitfully the surprising access they are given, and although their cameras inevitably alter reality on some level, some of these scenes are astonishing for their raw candor.

“Local News” is nearly as much about race relations as TV journalism. “A lot of people are gonna be tossed to the side because they haven’t been given an opportunity to perform or excel,” says Stokes, an African American.

Including her. She resigns at the end of Episode 1, believing her skin color thwarted her advancement at WCNC.

Even more emphatic is the tension between WCNC and reporter Beatrice Thompson, who doesn’t go quietly when let go here for causes not made clear. Twenty-two years after joining the station as the city’s first female African American TV journalist, is she being ousted because of her race? Her age? A resistance to change?

The reason seems clear to African American community leaders who are shown confronting Connors and General Manager Rick Keilty with their outrage over Thompson’s dismissal and their charges that Charlotte’s blacks are under-covered by WCNC.

“Everybody turns to 6 so we can see Bea,” says an elderly woman, her emotion evoking an entire history of racial acrimony and mistrust. Just as “Local News” itself raises a host of issues facing TV journalism today without being judgmental.

Affirming that murder and mayhem are no panacea, “6 News” still trails in the ratings, but is said to be doing better. And Connors remains on the job, his finest moment in the documentary coming when the station adds a 5 p.m. newscast that premieres disastrously. Afterward, Connors tells his staff that he personally is to blame, that act identifying him as the sanest news director in America.

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“Local News” can be seen tonight at 8 on KCET. The network has rated it TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).