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Kathy
Watson Stu
Watson
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Kathy Watson's May 1997 column that appeared under the title "Private Label" in Oregon Business magazine.
Old Guys Read the
News:
After weeks talking with Harry Lenhart as he reported and wrote our cover story, "The race to the bottom," I've decided to create my own fantasy team, just like my guy friends' fantasy baseball teams. Only I'd create a fantasy television news team so engaging you wouldn't even notice that the important stories of the day lack eye-popping visuals, or can't be teased with, "Mayor Katz sunbathes in her backyard. Film at 11." It's a team that would know how to let the drama of a legislative session flow into my living room, full of the tension and pathos of real lawmaking in progress. A team that could help me see what Oregon will be like in 10 years with its urban growth boundaries intact -- or vaporized. A team that would follow tax activist Bill Sizemore around long enough to see what happens when he wants to visit the library, and discovers it's now a U-Lock storage warehouse. And when it's time to vote, my fantasy news team would give me commentators who actually have lived in Oregon for more than six months, and haven't just moved here from the next smallest market. My team has been around. Why, they can even remember Governor Roberts. Now, I'm not asking for a lot of flash. My guys could give the helicopter to the cops. They don't need a fancy set. They can save the money they'd spend on slick consultants who would tell my team how to dress, fix their hair or wear makeup. Because my team's news show would be, "Old Guys Read the News." Yep, give me crusty, deep-thinking, hardworking journalists. Give me folks like -- you guessed it -- Cronkite, Murrow, Verne and Kuralt. Yet the glory days of TV news could live again even without cloning Walter's fingernail clippings. There are plenty of good journalists right here in Oregon. Many of them are already on TV. They are just living under a regime that views substance like a bad case of the Ebola virus. My team would shamelessly practice censorship, just like every other decent form of free media in the country. But rather than censoring out everything that doesn't smack of sex, violence or pet tricks, as local news is wont to do, they'd censor out everything that would waste their viewers' time. Because time is the one thing none of us gets back at the end of the day. A character in the play "The substance of fire" says of a trashy novel, "I wanted my time back after I read it." If that's how you feel about TV news at 6:30 every night, maybe it's time to breathe a little life into my fantasy team. Along about now, some TV news director is snickering, "Yeah, sister, and who would watch?" I would. Would you?
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