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September 22, 1997
CASHING IN ON DIANA'S MEMORY Credibility, once the cornerstone of American network news... ...continues to crumble as management teams try anything to drive up ratings and revenue. On Friday, September 19, the NBC and CBS evening newscasts led with the story of Princess Diana's bodyguard talking with Paris investigators; ABC News ran the same story as its first off-lead item. This, two full weeks after Diana's funeral. Significantly, almost all the entertainment-oriented magazine shows that followed ran with the same story. Once again the evening news was scarcely distinguishable from the tabloid news. What we're seeing with the continuing live-shots from London and Paris has much more to do with marketing than news. It's the same kind of marketing that the O.J. Simpson saga received: take celebrity, combine it with shocking and emotional events, then strain every ounce of controversy and mystery and detail from the story until it becomes an everyday concern and a sure-fire ratings grabber. It's what NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield, who now exerts control over the network's News Division program product, termed "familiar dramas" in his sworn testimony during the pre-trial deposition phase of Kent v. NBC. It is this commodity that NBC management, among others, craves most in editorial decision making, regardless of the damage done to traditional news values. Little or no thought is given to exercising balance and a sense of proportion in setting the day's news agenda. These constituent elements of credibility have been largely cast overboard. On this point, don't just take my word for it: consider what NBC's own management figures have to say. One of them was interviewed by Britain's respected Channel Four News on the eve of Princess Diana's funeral. "This story gives us a chance to equal or maybe even better CNN's ratings," she said, concluding: "It sounds sort of crass in television terms, but this is our Gulf War." NBC News rushed into London even more staffers than either CBS or ABC , 170 people in total. They had 20 camera crews on the street -- three times what the News Division deployed in Beijing the night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, double the number that covered the collapse of The Wall in Berlin. Diana filled the NBC schedule from morning through night, each program stoking interest in the next. Collectively, they created the sweeping kind of audience-awareness desired by the network's Entertainment Division to support it's own TV movie treatment, which is already in the works. In short, GE management at NBC seized the business potential of the tragedy more than any other network, British or American. It's clear that the network's programmers have not been so convinced of a story's profit potential since O.J.'s Bronco hit the freeway. Yet this is a fact conveniently ignored by NBC's own primetime magazine show, "Dateline NBC". On September 9th, "Dateline" announced: "Making money from the life and death of a Princess -- who's cashing in on Diana's memory." The anchor continued, "Now that she has died, we are seeing the beginnings of a mad rush to cash in on her memory." However the story that followed focused on Diana's clothing, mementos and souvenirs, with not a single mention of the massive profits flowing to TV magazine shows like "Dateline". The segment's correspondent, apparently unaware of her own role in the money-spinning machine, asked indignantly, "Is there an element of the macabre in all of this, this sense of profiting, almost, from her death ?" Macabre ? Indeed. And hypocrisy. Especially when the program ended by posing the possibility of punishment for the paparazzi. It is an understatement to say that "Dateline NBC" is in a very poor position on that score, since the program's per-minute advertising rates are reaping vastly greater profit for GE than tabloid pictures earn for photographers and their client newspapers. The GE-appointed management of NBC's News Division seems unaware that hypocrisy on this scale is as fundamental a fault as is factual inaccuracy. Both are synonymous with unreliability. Experienced NBC journalists -- and those at the other news divisions, too -- recall that their companies' histories and traditions have nothing in common with what we're witnessing now, which is nothing less than an editorial open-pit mining of Diana's story. It is considerably more than "sort of" crass; it is commercial excess at its most extreme and we should all, as professionals, exercise whatever influence remains to us to put a stop to it. |
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