Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Al Diamon
Exclusive! You Won’t Read this Anywhere Else!
If you got all your news from WGME-TV, Channel 13 in Portland, you’d have an idea of what was going on.
But just an idea. You wouldn’t want to get into an argument with somebody who’d read a newspaper. Particularly, a newspaper that covers Augusta.
By television news standards, that’s not too bad. Every day, this station airs lots of hard news, although many important stories are given so brief a mention as to be almost meaningless, and stories from the State House are sometimes out of date or erroneous.
Channel 13 does do an exceptional job with the weather and not just because it has loads of special-effects doodads. Meteorologist Charlie Lopresti handles the forecasting in a clear, concise manner that’s both calm and compelling. He appears to be interested and involved, but he never comes across as frantic or smarmy. He’s the class of the Maine market.
If only everybody at WGME had Lopresti’s slightly restrained on-air demeanor. But the station appears obsessed with proclaiming even the most routine interviews as exclusives and the most mundane stories as ones “you won’t see anywhere else.”
Channel 13 promotes itself as the “Breaking News” station. In practice, what that means is lots of crime and traffic accidents. If a water pipe bursts or a gas main leaks, they’re there. When something catches fire, they spew out the video. And if violence erupts, WGME makes it clear that “Breaking News” is just a somewhat classier way of saying “If it bleeds, it leads.”
The station’s 90-minute “Live At Five” newscast is fast-paced and filled with sound effects and graphics. They alert viewers to live reports – of which there are a great many, even when nothing’s going on – developing stories – which seems to be a euphemism for stories in which significant details are missing – reports about severe weather – although, not necessarily severe weather anywhere near Maine – and, of course, all that breaking news.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Convenience store hold-ups and routine fender benders qualify as news every bit as much as budget crises and school consolidation. Although unless you’re a participant in the former two, the latter pair are more likely to have an impact on your life. And Channel 13 wants to have that kind of impact.
“We do stories that are going to affect not only your day, but possibly your life,” anchor/reporter Jeff Peterson proclaims in a frequently aired promo.
If the last few weeks are any indication, those life-affecting stories don’t happen too often. And, come to think of it, there weren’t all that many pieces that affected my day, either. But given the amount of hype that accompanies WGME’s news, the average viewer could be forgiven if they didn’t notice.
On Jan. 8, for instance, anchor Gregg Lagerquist tried to sell his brief interview with presidential candidate John McCain as an exclusive, although McCain talked to dozens of reporters that day. And all he said to WGME was that he’d been campaigning non-stop and could use a nap. Stop the presses.
In general, Channel 13’s reporting on the New Hampshire primary was heavy on hype, but short on focus. The station sent two on-air people to the Granite State – Lagerquist, identified as its “senior political reporter” (shades of The Daily Show), even though he does political stories infrequently and Doug Ray (junior political reporter?). Their reporting provided little insight.
On Jan. 7, WGME had video of Hillary Clinton’s famous teary moment in a Portsmouth diner. But Lagerquist failed to explain the context in which the tears occurred, and it wasn’t until I watched a national news show later that evening that I got some inkling as to what had happened and its possible significance. Channel 13’s reporting would have benefited from interviewing somebody capable of analyzing the event. Instead, most of the station’s coverage consisted of soundbites of the candidates giving their stump speeches at rallies and pat answers at news conferences.
Maybe that’s just as well. When WGME got away from the standard spot news of the day, it floundered. On Jan. 8, reporter Lucas Colavecchio reported from New Hampshire that Clinton would shake up her campaign the next day by bringing in several Washington bigshots. Colavecchio said he got that scoop from rumors circulating in the press room. Rumors that turned out to be false.
In that same story, Colavecchio told us Clinton’s campaign had been “faltering over the last couple of days” and her staff was “conceding defeat already somewhat” to Barack Obama. Whoops.
In what I guess I can call an exclusive interview that you won’t read anywhere else, news director Robb Atkinson defended his just-cover-the-candidates approach. “The difference between our coverage and [rival Portland TV channels] 6 and 8 is that it’s as if they went to a football game, and instead of interviewing the players, they talked to the announcers,” he said. “We were out there talking to the candidates, not [Today show anchor] Matt Lauer.”
Atkinson has a point. But in addition to fluff like the Lauer interview, Channel 6 provided perspective by talking to several experts on New Hampshire politics, something WGME’s coverage lacked.
Unfortunately, in Channel 13’s rush to break stories, vital information is often absent from its airwaves. Like the name of the person being interviewed. In a Jan. 8 piece on a fire in Gorham, reporter Diana Ichton talked to some anguished people who had just lost their home and their pets. Leading up to the first soundbite, Ichton mentioned a 23-year-old man, but the person speaking in the video was much older. The 23-year-old’s father? Maybe. He’s mentioned later in the story, just before a younger man speaks on camera.
This isn’t an isolated example. Nameless faces populated WGME’s stories. Politicians. Voters. Victims. Atkinson said the station’s policy is to identify all interviewees, blaming the slips on deadline pressure. But it sometimes appeared that putting the anonymous faces’ pain on display was of primary importance. Taking more care in identifying each speaker might remove the impression that WGME was exploiting people just to enhance its ratings.
More hype: On Jan. 10, Peterson announced that fire had wiped out “an entire neighborhood just across the Maine border in Littleton, New Hampshire.” Setting aside the geographic blunder (Littleton is on the opposite side of New Hampshire from Maine), the Associated Press reported the blaze consumed a large warehouse and two houses. Channel 13 aired interviews with several people (who were actually identified) whose houses didn’t catch fire, and the station’s own video seemed to show most of the neighborhood still standing. It was a big fire, but the “entire neighborhood” assertion was over the top.
Atkinson dismissed any criticism of that report as “semantics.” He said Colavecchio had described the scene to him as “utter devastation” in a phone conversation. “If my reporter tells me the entire neighborhood has been destroyed, I believe him,” Atkinson said. “If that’s what he’s saying, that’s what it is.”
Hillary Clinton might disagree.
In order to fit all the devastation it can into each newscast, WGME has a tendency to skip attribution. Information is often presented with little indication of where it came from or how reliable it might be. In the Littleton fire story, Colavecchio said the cause would likely never be determined. Who told him that? The fire chief? A cop? The local rumor mill? No hint. In his primary coverage, Lagerquist announced there’d be a record voter turnout. Was he guessing? Or did somebody tell him that? Somebody who wasn’t Colavecchio?
Breaking news may be Channel 13’s focus, but when it breaks in Augusta, the news staff sometimes has a difficult time sorting out the pieces. On the 5 p.m. newscast on Jan. 10, reporter Catherine Parrotta made a stab at covering the release of Gov. John Baldacci’s supplemental budget. Parrotta displayed the document, making much of how long it was (for future reference, all budget documents are long), before informing viewers it contained cuts in spending for human services and a proposal to “redefine” the state’s jails. That information had been released the previous day during the governor’s state-of-the-state address and was in all the morning papers. She then offered two soundbites from bureaucrats, one of which featured corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson and was incomprehensible, mostly because Parrotta neglected to inform us that the governor had substantially altered his jail plan. That information was tagged onto the end of the same story by the anchor when it ran again at 6 p.m., although that didn’t make whatever Magnusson had to say any more understandable.
On Jan. 14, WGME got blown away on news that the state Land Use Regulation Commission had rejected one wind farm proposal in western Maine and approved another. While rival WCSH was reporting those decisions, Channel 13 was telling us the commission was still deliberating.
One reason WGME might not have been on top of the wind-power issue is because it had its hands full. There had been a big snow storm that day, and even though it was mostly over, the station sent four reporters out on the streets to tell us … well, that it was slippery in Portland. There had been a few accidents. Some flights at Portland Jetport were delayed, although most were now on time. And “our exclusive plow cam” was providing live shots of I-295, which appeared to be … dark. I couldn’t see much of anything, except the occasional headlights of cars in the other lane.
Senior political reporter Lagerquist wasn’t available to cover the politically charged wind farm story, because he was hosting “The Fugitive Files,” a continuing feature in which photos and descriptions of wanted felons are displayed. When viewers phone in tips, WGME reporters ride along with Cumberland County Sheriff’s deputies to cover any arrests. On this night, one woman wanted for theft and forgery turned herself in after seeing herself profiled on the tube, and a man wanted for drunk driving and being an habitual offender phoned to say he’d surrender if he could plea bargain his case.
It probably made for better TV than the wind farm deliberations, but it didn’t have nearly as much effect on my life as those turbines might.
WGME sometimes devotes the entire second segment of its newscast to a single topic. This is a better idea in theory than in practice. In October, I watched a debate on the proposed Washington County casino, moderated by Lagerquist. It took nearly all of the half hour before anybody said anything they hadn’t said dozens of time before, and while waiting, I was subjected to the same video of people playing slot machines at least six times.
A Jan. 4 special recalling the ice storm of 1998 had some compelling images. So compelling, apparently, that Channel 13 used the same tree branch falling and the same electrical worker chipping ice a half-dozen times. What the program didn’t have was anything fresh. Lots of people talked about where they were and how they suffered through the natural disaster. Only once in the half hour did anyone discuss the storm’s long-term impact. Reporter Doug Rafferty interviewed a forestry expert, who said the effects on the forests were still being felt. In what way? That wasn’t clear. Nor were the economic implications. As for how the ice storm had changed emergency preparedness by the state and utilities, no mention. While meteorologists admitted they didn’t see the storm coming in ’98, none of them told us whether they’d be able to do a better job today.
When I raised these points with Atkinson, he grew agitated. “We looked back at it for lessons learned,” he said. “You’re saying we shouldn’t have done that? That’s not even a real question. We got a lot of compliments on that show, including from Angus King [the former governor, who was interviewed in the program].
“Just because you didn’t like it doesn’t make it wrong.”
That’s an exclusive.
Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
Posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 in Permalink
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