As much as it grieves me to say it, while “the good old days” and “blame it on the media” are sim­plis­tic clich­es, in the space of two weeks, they have com­bined as a suc­cinct sum­ma­tion of the state of  the news business.

The leg­endary jour­nal­ist hotel, the Com­modore in Beirut, which just closed for­ev­er, was “the good old days” writ large.
Cour­tesy of the Byzan­tine con­nec­tions of its own­er Yussef Naz­zal, the Com­modore was a safe haven from the armed idiots who ruled the streets of Beirut in the 1970s and ‘80s. In the days before cell phones and portable satel­lite equip­ment, it also had what jour­nal­ists in war zones val­ued most: a reli­able telex line.  (That the bar was always open and what­ev­er you spent in it appeared on your bill as telex and laun­dry ser­vices was an added bonus.)

 

TV sto­ries had to be in a taxi on the way to a satel­lite link in Amman by night­fall, which meant the boss­es in New York had to trust your news judgement.
None ever demand­ed, as the new CBS edi­tor Bari Weiss did in a recent memo to staff, that “… every sin­gle night has some­thing with viral poten­tial.” The memo also exhort­ed staff to “dri­ve” the news.
Ms Weiss could do with the les­son taught to me by the edi­tor who sent me to the first war I ever cov­ered, Ango­la 1975.
His “hero­gramme” to myself and two col­leagues for a front page sto­ry on a fire­fight in which we became tar­gets, end­ed with the line: “Kind­ly remem­ber uncan (telex­ese for ‘you can­not’)  file if dead.”
A suc­cinct reminder that the job is to tell, not be the story.
The pow­er of TV news is to take peo­ple places they’ve nev­er been, show them things they’ve nev­er seen and tell them what they need to know.
You can’t do that with a “star” wav­ing hands and arms about and yam­mer­ing to the camera.
It requires pic­tures, sound and a well-craft­ed nar­ra­tion, writ­ten by the reporter who was on the scene.
Accord­ing to one report, one night Ms. Weiss and her aides were rewrit­ing an Evening News script until just before airtime.
Here’s some TV 101 for them: TV and print writ­ing dif­fer in sen­tence struc­ture, and nar­ra­tion has to work with pictures.
Aver­age nar­ra­tion speed is 2.5 words per sec­ond, about 250 words in a one minute 45 sec­ond piece (a lux­u­ry these days). A sound bite or two and some nat­ur­al sound to add tex­ture, and you’re down to about 200 words.
It took a hell of a lot of patience on the part of tal­ent­ed pro­duc­ers and edi­tors to help me make the tran­si­tion from print to TV.
I seri­ous­ly doubt Ms Weiss or any of her acolytes with no TV expe­ri­ence can write that con­cise­ly and coher­ent­ly from the get-go.

             A LITTLE MORE CLARITY

CBS now wants its on-air peo­ple to inject more per­son­al­i­ty and infor­mal­i­ty into the newscast.
“Infor­mal­i­ty” seems to me to be the polar oppo­site of seri­ous, believ­able or grav­i­tas, cru­cial ele­ments that add up to credibility.
When I joined CBS (in, yes, “the good old days”),  I was told that CBS style is “the unique abil­i­ties of our correspondents”.
Cor­re­spon­dents and pro­duc­ers were also free to fight their cor­ner when it came to script alter­ations, sto­ry angle, con­tent and — believe it or not –exec­u­tive decisions.
Ms Weiss has blamed some sub­or­di­nates for not staunch­ing the crit­i­cism being heaped upon her and CBS.
Madam, crit­i­cism is what you learn from. Staunch­ing it is per­pe­trat­ing ignorance.
Speak­ing of which: the lede under the New York Times head­line “Trump Says Iran Is Stop­ping Its Killings of Pro­test­ers …”  read: “Pres­i­dent Trump said on Wednes­day that the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment appeared to have stopped killing protesters…”
The head­line was defin­i­tive, while the lede car­ried a caveat, which would make it a pri­ma facie case for “blame it on the media”.
The back­up quote from Trump added con­fu­sion: “We’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stop­ping — it’s stopped — it’s stopping.”
Giv­en that Trump’s mean­der­ing syn­tax could mean either, both at the same time or noth­ing, sure­ly the state­ment demand­ed a fol­low-up for clar­i­fi­ca­tion, instead of leav­ing it up to the read­er to decide whether the killing was slow­ing down, or had actu­al­ly stopped.
The  sto­ry went on to note that Trump said he had received the infor­ma­tion from “very impor­tant sources on the oth­er side” and would “find out” lat­er if it was accu­rate.
What sources? Iran­ian offi­cials? An actu­al intel­li­gence source? Or his own head?
In the days of pres­i­dents who for the most part spoke coher­ent­ly, the issue of clar­i­ty rarely cropped up, and if it did, would have been addressed.
What con­sti­tutes “the good old days” may for the most part, be a prod­uct of fond if fad­ing memories.
But “blame it on the media” was more often than not a minor­i­ty position.
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