THE NEW UNREALITY

"I was asked to do Somalia for the weekend news and I've never been to Somalia and I'm thinking, Oh my god, what am I gonna do? I get every bit of research I can find, but even if I'm correct and accurate, I'm superficial. And I don't want to be superficial." The speaker is Martha Teichner of CBS News, one of the most respected foreign correspondents in American television, and she has a complaint: these days she spends less time reporting from the scene and more time writing voice-overs at the London bureau.

She doesn't like it: "You're not just a sieve. You are an interpreter of visual events and accumulated political knowledge. That's why you are a reporter. You're not just voicing whatever it is that the pictures have to say."

But cutbacks in network news budgets, Teichner says, are changing her job. "More and more, we're becoming packagers rather than reporters," she says. "You weigh the number of times you go out and do it for real against the number of times you narrate, and hope that [the ratio] is satisfactory enough so that you don't feel that you're too compromised."

These days a lot of television reporters are making such calculations and a lot of them are unhappy with the results.

"One of the reasons I became a reporter was to indulge my curiosity, to meet and talk to people," says Mike Jensen, NBC News' chief financial correspondent. Jensen feels he has nothing to apologize for, but, "to the extent that I have to hand that off to someone else to be in the edit room, I'm not happy about it." Jensen figures he has done three times as many voice-over stories this year as last year. "It's the new reality," he says.

Paul Friedman, executive producer of ABC's World News Tonight, worries about the increase in voice-over reporting, too. "You can't say you believe in the importance of reporters -- people who can go out and find a story and understand it -- and then say, 'Look, it doesn't matter that they're not out there.' It matters." Friedman sees the impact on his competitors: "You look at [CBS's chief European correspondent] Tom Fenton, a guy I wish were working for this network. When I see him more and more voicing-over pieces, that bothers me."

It troubles Fenton, too, because, Fenton says, "it's always second best. You get a feel for the story by being there. And, of course, every time you go out and do a story, you find another story. And you often find that things are wildly different from the way they're reported in the local press."

Former NBC News executive Tom Wolzien says voice-over reporting poses a special problem when the news comes from overseas. "When you know where something comes from and you know who provides it to you, it's validated," he says. "If the network gets material from an affiliate, it's probably okay, because there's a professional relationship there." But with overseas video wire services "you start worrying about it. By the time the tape gets on the air, nobody has the foggiest idea who made it or whether the pictures were staged."

Before he left NBC in 1991, Wolzien was working on setting up a video identification system to answer questons such as: Where did this video come from? and Who shot it? But Jay Fine senior vice-president for operations and planning at NBC, says nobody has followed up on Wolzien's initiative.

With the rise in voice-overs, meanwhile, comes the temptation to provide the visual impression that the reporter who does the voice-over also did the reporting on the story. For viewers, the clues that a reporter they her -- and sometimes see -- speaking was never actually reporting at the scene are subtle. Datelines of bureaus rather than story sites are one hint; another is no dateline at all -- just the name of the reporter and the news organization at the end of the piece.

CBS's Betsy Aaron, who has signed off with datelines from such places as Baghdad, Moscow, and Afghanistan, summmed up the danger for an Alfred I. du Pont Forum held at Columbia University earlier this year. "I think back on the stories that I was able and honored to cover and I know now in my heart and my head that I will never cover stories of that substance again," Aaron said. "I don't believe that buying footage and looking at it second-hand is a substitute for going there yourself.

"I do know that when I look at the tape and I don't see what's beyond that tape, I am not seeing the story. I'm relying on someone else to gather that storyfor me. I have no idea what the person's agenda was -- and there always is an agenda. And we're putting that on the air with the CBS label or the NBC label or the ABC label and we're doing it in a cavalier fashion that we never would hae done twenty years ago or ten years ago or even five years ago."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe