In 1985, the Washington Journalism Review published its first “Best in the Business” issue, after soliciting the opinions of readers and experts on the leading purveyors of broadcast and print information.
In an article titled “Battle Hymns and Autumn Wonders: The Poetry of the Best in Broadcast Prose,” former CBS producer Edward Bliss, Jr. chose some ” examples of truly good writing” from more than four decades of radio and TV newscasts.
Save one, Bliss’s choices were conventional ones: Edward R. Murrow for his coverage of the London blitz and Eric Sevareid for his coverage of Murrow’s death. Winston Burdett made the list for his report on the shooting of Pope John Paul, Bruce Morton for the funeral of Robert Kennedy, and Charles Kuralt for feeding an apple and some cheese to a pair of chipmunks in Wyoming.
Not to mention Andy Rooney, Morley Safer, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Charles Osgood, Harry Reasoner, Edwin Newman, John Hart, and — unexpectedly – – me.
I had been a network correspon- dent for seven years, the others for eons. I had covered stories of middling importance, the others history in the raw. I had achieved little renown, the others enough to be pin-ups in the hearts of journalism students from one end of America to the other. Nonetheless, Bliss saw fit to propose me for his pantheon with the following words:
Tennessee Williams once said that, for him, happiness was a morning of good writing. When Williams died NBC’s obituary of him was written by Eric Burns. ” His mornings,” Burns wrote, “led to some of the best evenings in the history of the American theater.”
Shortly before he died, the eat ragtime pianist and composer Eubie Blake celebrated his 100th birthday. He received many tributes. In reporting them, Burns said, “They celebrated the long life of the man and the even longer life of the music.”
My first reaction to the article was pride, but that passed as quickly as a sound bite. I could immodestly accept the idea that the writing samples he had chosen were above average by the standards of television news. But as published, set in type, and laid down on the page, these passages seemed lifeless and superficial, a parlor-game variety of wordplay. And this was true not only of the words I had fashioned myself. Cronkite and Sevareid, and Newman, Burdett and Hart — all of us found ourselves unwittingly exposed by the page’s cold white glow.
Or was I being unfair to myself and my fellow glittering best”s? After all, the lines singled out by Bliss had never been intended for the silent contemplation of a reader. Rather, they were to be spoken aloud at viewers who had only one chance to grasp them as they sailed through the air, and who might be distracted at the moment by other occurrences of the household: a microwave beeping or a phone ringing, a baby crying or a mate demanding sympathy for the day’s labors.
Someone clears his throat and misses a word, rubs his eyes and loses a scene.
Alas, I was not being unfair. Broadcast prose is a form of communication no less than print, employing the same tools, aspiring to the same ends. It means to judge what events are important and to present them as clearly and as thoroughly as possible. A TV viewer expects no less of his newscast than does a newspaper reader of his morning edition. Should both media, then, not be subject to roughly the same standards? Should the tube be excused its shortcomings simply because they are inherent?
If the page reveals the television script’s inadequacies, it proves itself the more demanding forum of the two. It demonstrates that TV news too often sacrifices precision to generality, comprehensiveness to artifice, and sense to tempo. The latter seems to me the most serious offense, and is commonly the cause of the other two.
Take, as an example, the way I eulogized Eubie Blake on the air. I heard the formalized tones, the clipped enunciation, the dips and doodles of my professional broadcaster’s delivery. “They celebrated the long life of the man,” I had said, and then, approaching the point at which the phrase turned cutely, I angled my head as the camera zoomed in for a closeup, “and the even longer life” — pause to establish downbeat — “of the music.” Rimshot. “Eric Burns, NBC News, New York.” A little coda. how potent cheap music is,” Noel Coward once said, and if he could only see the ratings for Eyewitness News or Action News or News Center 4 or 6 or 8, he would know how right he was.
The cadences of broadcast journalism are the result not just of its oral presentation, but of an exaggerated concern for brevity. According to The Elements of Style, “Asentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” Undeniable. But who is to define unnecessary? Under what pressures is the definition made? Is a deadline approaching? Are the viewers growing restive? Are the commercial breaks getting longer? Are the consultants urging an even lower common denominator?
In recent years, television news has begun to take brevity to the point of self-defeat; its drawings are stick figures and its machines too stripped- down to operate as they should. The virtue of concision has, through excess, become a vice.
George Orwell was among the first to realize that this could happen. In 1984, Winston Smith is warned about Big Brother’s assault on the language, and the reason behind it: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.” In television news, the range of concsiousness has been shrinking at an alrming rate, having now diminished so much that a reporter is occasionally able to speak without conveying any meaning whatsoever — to produce sound only, pure rhythem. What follows is an example of news speak that is as senseless as it is succinct. It came from the mouth of a reporter at WABC-TV in New York. Her subject was delays along bus routes, her logic unassailable:
If you’re among millions who spend a lot of time waiting for buses, you’re not alone.
Dean Acheson, who served as Secretary of State under President Truman, was greatly unimpressed with a fellow named Chester Bowles, formerly an ambassador to India who, in 1958, was contemplating a run for the United States House of Representatives from Connecticut. The problem, in Acheson’s view, was that Bowles had at one time been an advertising executive, even conspiring to found his own agency. Acheson did not think such a background could be overcome. In a letter to his friend Eugene Rostow, he explained why. “Time spent in the advertising business,” Acheson wrote, “seems to create a permanent deformity, like the Chinese habit of foot-binding.”
The same can be true, I fear, of time spent in television news. The field is hostile to topics that outlast the quotidian, to the notion of solitary deliberation, to the very existence of complexity and nuance. Mind-binding, let us call it, and the longer that one works in the business, subjecting himself to its ruthless strictures, the smaller his personal range of consciousness becomes.
While employed at NBC News, I was a victim of this process at the same time that I caught Edward Bliss’s eye by my deftness in perpetrating it.
More than a decade after the fact, I look back on Bliss’s article in the February 1985 issue of the old Washington Journalism Review and find his reference to me more of a warning than an honor. Cheap music may be potent; it is by no means enriching.
By Eric Burns; Eric Burns is the author of Broadcast Blues
