WHAT A DIFFERENCE a night makes. Chaos reigns in the evening, but the morning can bring sanity and relief.
That’s how it was for me this week as a news consumer. Having long ago forsaken cable TV news as a hotbed of empty loud-mouthery instead of actual news, on Tuesday I picked NPR as the vector to bring me information about the latest criminal indictment of ex-President Donald Trump. As we all now know, he’ll be arraigned in court (once again, this time in DC) at 4pm today. Another big chance for the media loud-mouths, without doubt.
I was of course hoping for calm articulateness from Tuesday’s radio coverage. I’m generally and rather obviously an admirer of NPR; since 2006, after all, the radio version of this very The Media Beat column has appeared weekly on Connecticut’s plucky WHDD, which proudly calls itself the “the smallest NPR station in the nation.” But for the indictment coverage, in place of my anticipated delivery of assured reportorial authority, the network decided to provide me and its other 23 million listeners with an inedible diet of confusion and mess.
Both of the joint hosts, Ailsa Chang and Sacha Pfeiffer – often simultaneously rather than separately – talked in erratic spurts with a gathered clutch of specialist correspondents … Carrie Johnson (Justice) … Kelsey Snell (Congress) … Franco Ordoñes (Washington Desk) … and Dustin Jones (Investigations Unit). A very full house.
The news trade generally calls this approach ‘team coverage’ – or sometimes ‘flooding the zone,’ a more internal slangy term which tellingly hints at the problems it can bring. Frankly, it works better for news-gathering than for news-presenting. In newspapers, and especially with disaster stories, it can be powerfully effective … but it’s a risky business in live broadcast journalism, especially if an entire team ends up being spotlighted at one and the same time instead of singly. NPR took the risk and lost its bet heavily, through some appallingly sloppy execution.
I can only describe the result as a gaggle – confusion plus a near breathlessness of over-excitement at the live developments in Washington, with the participants stumbling over each other and their own sentences. They slipped and slid into abandoning reporters’ strict conventions, forgetting (for instance) to use the all-important words “alleged” and “allegedly,” and calling Trump “the President, um the former president” several times over.
They appeared so self-involved in their own urgent efforts that in the run-up to public comments from the prime mover of the whole event, Special Counsel Jack Smith, they even came late to his appearance at the podium. Almost unbelievably, they actually lost for us the opening words of Smith’s measured, historic remarks about the indictment and the alleged plot to undermine, indeed overturn America’s democracy.
IN THE COLD LIGHT of dawn, mercifully, we had the next day’s Morning Edition, with hosts A Martínez and Leila Fadel. In utter contrast they applied the simple remedy of well-structured interviews with insightful, though not of course wholly dispassionate or unbiassed, public sources. First came Representative Adam Schiff from the Congressional investigative committee which emphatically referred its evidence on Trump’s alleged offenses to the Department of Justice eight months ago. And then there was former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori who has a lot of experience in successfully sending white collar criminals to prison.
You might say it’s easy for a broadcast that airs so much later to seem assured in its coverage. But that is precisely my point. The so-called ‘Special Coverage’ team also had plenty of time to plan for Tuesday’s events, whenever those events might actually have come about. NPR has known full well, like everyone else, that this news was on its way since July 18th, when Trump received his prosecutors’ ‘Target Letter.’ And on a broader level, little journalistic horse-sense was needed to anticipate this week’s events ever since Congress sent the criminal referral to the D.O.J. in January,, or indeed ever since the original appointment of Jack Smith well before that.
It is elementary program-making to do what Morning Edition carried out so simply, what sensible broadcast producers do all the time: put together well-prepared ‘packages’ – ahead of time but kept up to date. There is an obvious, basic knack to this, and apart from their innate editorial usefulness, the packages will also rescue on-air talent from having to talk idly, filling dead airtime.
Tuesday evening’s aimless, close-to-empty chatter put me in mind of an old Lowland Scottish adage, “When you have nothing to say, say nothing.”
The very word ‘producer’ has as its core the root duce (as in the original Latin verb ducere, ‘to lead’ and the modern Italian noun Duce, ‘Leader’). There was precious little leadership evident in the team that brought us NPR’s Special Coverage.
