Media Musings: Making an issue of a non-story
Sometimes a story comes along that highlights the differences between TV news and newspapers so vividly it’s impossible to ignore.
It must have given Rutherford County Mayor Nancy Allen heartburn at breakfast to read her county was facing bankruptcy. Surely, she would be among the first to know of such a financial crisis and since the states – and therefore the counties – are facing the greatest financial agony since the Great Depression, the headline would not seem absurd to a casual reader.
The Tennessean gave the story top play in my edition and rightly so if the story supported the headline. Well, it did and it didn’t.
The curse of journalism has always been it has to start a story somewhere and generations of students have been taught to use the summary lead, journalism jargon for stuffing the essence of a story in the first 30 words. Summary leads are still used, of course, but the students are now taught all sorts of difference approaches to draw the attention of the reader.
The lead on the bankruptcy story did seem to say the county was facing serious financial problems and then detailed the pressures being felt by endless growth and demand for schools and resources. The source of the story was the respected director of the Business and Economic Research Center at MTSU who did a study on the county’s finances.
Now, let’s take this story and convert it to TV news. The version I saw showed the research director saying he never said the county was facing bankruptcy and, in truth, he never did. The print version did make it clear that existing revenues would not be enough and that all of the remedies suggested already had been tried. Allen spoke to that along with saying that the county would work out its problems.
TV dwelled on how misleading the print story was. Because TV has such a fear that any story may run too long to keep you watching, gave it 90 seconds.
If the causal reader or watcher relied on the headline and the some of the TV version, they could easily believe old Rutherford, the raging bull of growth and constant expansion, was rolling toward fiscal catastrophe. Or they could have ended up a bit confused about the whole matter. And, what’s more painful, is that it’s a non-story.
Not many days pass when we don’t read and see battles over taxes, schools, roads, prisons, and any other function government must provide. We all know every county, rich or poor, has leadership challenged by those who don’t want to pay for anything and those who see progress and quality education. Rutherford is no different.
The story also shows how newspapers did set the agenda for much of what passes for television news in Nashville.
What’s of serious concern, is that the stations do almost no enterprise reporting any more. Yes, there is the good work of Nancy Amons at Channel 4 and Phil Willliams at Channel 5 and Larry Brinton is a fine bellicose voice from the age of blunt-spoken journalism commentary.
What’s missing in these operations is the hard-headed, demanding editors who used to force reporters to rewrite their work, pause to look for correctness and balance, justify story ideas, and accuracy. They won’t return. They were great teachers and passionate about news. Their ranks thin with each passing year. I have a feeling if they had been standing at the gate, these stories would never been assigned.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)