CSotD: Don’t bother — they’re here
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I've stopped watching the talking head shows on Sunday, but, if I ever feel the urge to start up again, I'm going to consult this Matt Bors cartoon first.
For two or three years, I wrote for a magazine that was distributed to Realtors in the Colorado Springs market and basically existed for the sake of running pages of new housing charts in those pre-web days: You could reference them to search for housing by number of bedrooms, by price, by location.
The stories I wrote were profiles of various companies or new housing projects in the area, plus alternating interviews with the presidents of the Board of Realtors and the Home Builders Association.
While I attempted to be honest in what I wrote, nobody would have mistaken this for "journalism," and it was understood within the closed community of our readers that "snug" meant "tiny" and "unique design" meant "you'd better take a look at this yourself before you bring any buyers to see it."
And because it was all aboveboard, I didn't feel any need to cross-examine the BoR and HBA presidents about whatever they felt like talking about. The readers certainly didn't expect it.
I knew what I was being paid to do, the checks didn't bounce and everybody seemed to respect my ability to make the information available without fawning but without delusions of journalism either.
Which brings us to these Sunday talking-head shows, which basically provide platforms for the same two dozen bloviators to bloviate away.
I think I'd respect them more if they'd just haul out the Snuggis and Pocket Fishermen and start flashing an 800-number on the screen and quit pretending to be committing journalism.
It's not that they're "prejudiced" or "slanted" or "biased." It's that they're bullshit, and I don't think they even know it.
You keep hearing about how young people today — no, wait, that should be an acronym — You keep hearing about how YPT get their news from Jon Stewart, but it's not because Stewart is funny, though he certainly is.
It's because Jon Stewart knows what he does for a living. I don't think David Gregory does.
I can respect a guy with a red nose and seltzer bottle, as long as he knows he's a clown.
And speaking of television
I'm going to guess that either John Deering or John Newcombe has been a Neilsen Household, or else one of them has worked in local television, because today's Zack Hill actually reflects how TV ratings work.
Another of the odd jobs with which I've kept the wolf off the welcome mat, if not entirely away from the door, was as first an ad salesman and then marketing director of an NBC affiliated TV station.
We didn't subscribe to Neilsen; we used Arbitron, but the methodology was the same: It's a little like being called for jury duty. You get a letter from the ratings company asking you to be a "household" for a sweeps period of a few weeks and, assuming you agree, you get a diary in which you are supposed to track who watched what during that period.
The eerily-accurate part that gives today's strip away is "What time did you turn it on?" because it's not enough to say that you watched "On the Waterfront." You have to say how much of it you watched, because they break the time periods down by 15 minute segments, so that, for example, they can tell who watches the entire "Tonight Show" and who switches off after the monologue.
This means that not only are ratings only as dependable as sample size, but they're only as dependable as compliance within that sample. In a major metro, there may be some validity in ratings, but in a mid-size or small market, they should be taken with a large grain of salt.
For example, according to our ratings book, nobody watched "Sesame Street."
Now, this was just before "The Muppet Show" debuted, but you still couldn't find anyone in America under the age of 10 who didn't know Kermit and Grover and Oscar. According to The Book, however, they weren't watching.
Five-year-olds don't fill in diaries and, apparently, neither did their parents on their behalfs.
Which is not to say The Book didn't have some integrity: A year or so after I left the station, my boys were watching a locally-hosted afternoon kids' show while I did dishes and fixed dinner, and my ears perked up because the host — who was also the station's new weatherman — started chatting about how we were in the May sweeps.
First Rule of Sweeps is that nobody talks about sweeps. But he did better than that: He said he'd always been curious about how it all worked and he invited anyone in the audience who was keeping a diary to call and tell him about the experience.
I called not him but the station manager and told him what had just happened on his station, and he responded with stunned profanity.
He had to turn himself in to Arbitron, and the next ratings book contained a disclaimer and deleted a portion of the station's ratings because of tampering.
To be honest, this station manager had fired me in order to free up budget to hire the guy who had just screwed up on live TV, so I got some laughs out of it, but, still …
No, never mind. It was hilarious.
Incidentally, the entire glamor team he hired had moved on within two years, including his new anchor, Charles Claverie.
Yes.
Yes, I had been canned by a station manager who shared Jean Doumanian's keen eye for news anchors.
I take some comfort in that.
What's the difference between "chutzpah" and "cojones"?
I love today's Bizarro, which Dan Piraro credits to his collaborator, Wayno. It's not just a new joke riffing on an ancient one, but one that requires you to reference the fossil on your own.
And therein lies the difference: It takes chutzpah to tell a "fly in my soup" joke. It takes cojones to not tell it.
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