Radio-TV Observer

A special USA-365 supplement by Mark Smith

9-14-2005

We are all media observers. We all watch, listen and read and we know what we like.

Media is a business designed to make money off the public by entertaining them. It often does not have redeeming value, logic or a moral base. But it isn't required to. I ask you to accept TV, newspapers and radio as the creative, possibility and mistake-laden free form entities that they are.

Don't make too much of what is said, written or aired. It isn't about you, it's about them.

That also applies to anyone who dares to be a critic.

(9-14-2005) The disappointing aspect of the 2005 prep football season so far is, there's no tape-delay television of local games on Friday, Saturday or even Monday. NW Indiana used to be unique. For a span of about 10 years, there had been two games aired on public television Channel 56 and local cable (what is now ComCast) in Lake and Porter County.

The games were always an expensive proposition for WYIN Channel 56, which could only seek 'underwriting' (an indirect form of advertising to pay for the broadcasts. Two years ago, Channel 56 ceased airing locally produced basketball and football. WYIN does carry plenty of college basketball (including Valparaiso), but that's a mistake in judgment if the goal is to attract viewers. Nothing is bigger than high school basketball in Indiana.

Com Cast cable had consistently done a game of the week, but now their mobile broadcast truck is down and out for an indefinite period. It could be back in action next week. It could be back next year. There clearly is no urgency to get the games back on the air.

There is still an interest for local fans and players watching the game late Friday night. What is needed is someone to independently finance broadcasts renting the facilities from Com Cast or someplace else. That's the future of local prep sports because there's no motivation for either WYIN or Com Cast cable to continue the tape delay games much longer.

Both Thursday night weekly highlight shows have been cut to 30 minutes (they were both originally an hour in length) and, while they haven't lost much in content, both are dying for a fresh approach. Taped game highlights of games played six days ago are not exactly a breaking story. The format is older than corn bread and thankfully, both outlets are tweakiing their Thursday productions.

WYIN has begun a Friday night highlight show at 10:30 p.m. It's a little sloppier than the Thursday night shows but it's obviously much more newsworthy. One problem is that many who attend games aren't home by 10:30 and never see it. But it's a good idea. WYIN should consider re-running the Friday night highlights later or again Saturday morning. Somebody might want to consider moving the Thursday night shows to Tuesday or Wednesday. There's nothing good about Thursday night for the highlight shows. Freshman football is Thursday. NFL football is Thursday. It's a bad night and both highlight shows should be moved.

But late in the season, everybody wants to see the entire game anyway, especially in the state tournament. Is that going to happen.? Maybe. Maybe not.

There's less TV football in NW Indiana but more football on radio. WJOB (1230) AM has settled into a steady game of the week with a tape delay game at 10:30 p.m..

They miss Jim Barber as the in-studio host but 'The Preacher' Steve Glover is doing a capable job. WJOB struggles beyond their No. 1 announcing crew. Color commentators do a lot of monotone double talking and saying nothing. I again ask game announcers to do some easy studying. Clearly some announcers, who you hear quote the records of the coaches, have at least looked that fact up. There are web sites which tell you about scores of games in the past 10 years.

That's not intense research, but it's a lot better than nothing. So many of the on-air people simply vomit up superlative after superlative. Everybody is wonderful, awesome, incredible and tremendous. That the No. 1 giveaway sign of an unskilled announcer. When you don't know what you're saying, just talk about how wonderful everyone and everything is.

For example. I know Lowell folks appreciated WJOB's tape-delay broadcast of the Morton-Lowell game despite the outcome, a 32-13 Morton win. But announcers and local writers were unaware that Lowell was playing without star players Jeff Clemens and Ethan Winel who were both injured (it was in the game stories) the previous week.

I don't understand how reporters or broadcasters can go to a game not having read the game story from the week before. Announcers and writers just went on and on about what a great victory this was and what an upset this was. If you knew the injury situation, it explained much of what happened. But if you didn't, you just talked about how awesome Morton was, covering up your ignorance of the situation.

In prep football, you have to know who is and isn't playing and why. I know it's just high school broadcasting, but you can still be professional at it. One question at WJOB: Where is Tommy Williams?

I was a little surprised at the vitriol with which the Post-Tribune's John Mutka attacked the White Sox because announcer John Rooney is leaving the team, reportedly in a contract dispute.

The White Sox didn't fire Rooney. They just didn't pay him what he wanted. That's part of the game. Easy come, easy go. It's not that hard to call baseball. They'll find somebody else.

1.) The Sox had a nine game lead in the first week of September and there were 14,000 people in the stands. The Sox are (or were) a runaway first place team and they can't give tickets away. TV ratings also suggest far more people care about whether the Cubs can luck into the playoffs than care about the Sox finishing first. Very few people care about the White Sox.

2.) John Rooney didn't draw fan one to the ballpark. He did a capable professional job and the Sox will find someone else to do a capable professional job. And no one will know the difference. Why? You guessed it. Very few people care about the White Sox. You can whine about why and how unfair it is but it doesn't change the fact.

Sox fans, for their own reasons, do not come to the ballpark or watch on TV and truthfully, less people want to read about them in the newspaper. And no issue-fabricating columnists (which is most all of us) can change that.

Speaking of announcers who are toast, WBBM (780) AM recently ash canned Hub Arkush who had done color on Bears broadcasts for more than a decade. Arkush knows more pro football than anybody, but three people in a radio broadcast booth is an ego trip.

Its no big deal. Remember, it's the Bears. They have three hour pre-game shows and three-hour post-game shows. Everyone who is or ever was connected to the Chicago Bears anytime in the past 20 years already is somewhere on Chicago radio.

The Bears are the most over covered entity in all of Chicago in any respect. No one listens to three hours of pregame coverage and only pre-game show sponsors don't know that. Folks listen to some of the post-game shows only for laughs when they lose to hear the drunks call in from the bars wanting to fire the coach and the quarterback.

Truthfully, there's a lot less interest in the NFL than there was 10 years ago if you consider TV ratings a barometer. Monday Night Football will go the way of most bad TV shows (Cancelled) after this year and the opening Sunday night game between Atlanta and Philadelphia was embarrassing to the entire league.

With the NFL increasingly populated by anti-social street punks like Terrell Owens and Cedric Benson, only mentally-challenged Fantasy Football idiots and alcoholics waste part of their bird brains on the NFL to any significant measure.

With the rise of tradition-rich Southern California and the apparent rebirth of Notre Dame, we are headed into an era where college football will be front page news and the NFL will get the TV ratings of 'Survivor-Afghanistan.'

Local radio and TV -- BREAKING NEWS: Whenever you discuss Fantasy Football or baseball in any way, the majority of your audience turns you off immediately because they recognize that you lack true sports knowledge because you are no longer discussing sports. You are ego-tripping about how many statistics you know. No one cares about who you have on a fantasy team. Go back down to the basement, turn off the lights and play with all your little fantasy men by yourself. As hard as it may be to believe, not everybody cares about you.

NW Indiana coverage of the RailCats playoff games seems a little overdone. When 1,800 people show up at the ballpark for playoff games, it indicates a certain lack of interest. I don't know what the thinking is at the Post-Tribune and the Times but the RailCats have to find a way to draw more fans so the local media can afford (financially and space-wise) to keep giving them saturation coverage.

I know the numbers. Railcats attendance is up slightly over last year but they had a perfect summer weather-wise with almost no rain.

And, no matter what they say publicly, to draw a so-called crowd of 1,038 for a deciding game of a playoff series on Sunday, Sept. 11, has to put the entire future of the franchise in question. Local papers did everything they could to beg people to attend the playoffs and attendance was downright poor.

It's like the Chicago White Sox. Talk is cheap, but box seats aren't. If you don't come to the games, either you don't have the money, you don't have the time, or maybe you don't care about the team involved.

I'll say it again. The Railcats must become affiliated with a major league team. Preferably the Cubs or Sox. But potentially, Cincinnati, St., Louis or Milwaukee is also a possibility. The Indianapolis Indians draw 13,000 for weekend games in September. Why? Because the fans are seeing Triple-AAA players who are a phone call from the major leagues.

One Chicago Cubs' A-ball team is in Lansing, Michigan. Why? If The Cubs Class A affiliate was Gary, Indiana, there would be 6,000 fans in the ballpark every night and everybody knows it. And the team wouldn't have to beg people to care about them.

It is an embarrassment to cable TV (if that's possible, remember, Geraldo and Tucker Carlson are still on the air) that the news channels are milking every drop of ratings out of the death and destruction down in Louisiana and Mississippi.

MSNBC still has a clock on the screen to remind you how many days its been since the killer Hurricane hit.

The idea of using people who have lost their loved ones for ratings is cynical. If you have not found your missing uncle in three weeks, he's probably one of the dearly departed. The networks know that. But they need someone to make the viewer cry. So they'll put the relative on the air and they hope he or she breaks into tears because that's great TV.

If you think the networks care about poor folks in New Orleans, ask yourself where Anderson Coper and Soledad O'Brien and Brian Williams and all the other media hurricane chasers stay every night. Ask them about what they have to eat and drink and how their clothes are cleaned.

The reporters don't work 24 hours straight. They get special treatment. The get food and water and a place to stay clean so they look good on camera every day. While the poor folks die. Ask yourself what kind of mental state you have to work yourself to cover floods and death during the day and go back to warm bed and a hot meal at night.

What ever lie they tell you, do you think the cable news people aren't eating and are living in their cars so they can feel the pain of the hurricane victims?

If you have to have reporters cover the story (and I agree you do), why not the local reporters who live in New Orleans, know where everything is and understand what's happened? Why do network reporters rush to a local/national story, knock the local reporters to the ground and and hog air time dripping phony sentiment about a town they've never set foot in before?

But the darkest question is how many people did the cable news and weather channels convince to stay in the path of the hurricane.

Folks don't want to leave their homes. And when they turn on TV and see the weather reporters 'riding' out the storm to 'give you the story' and jack up their ratings (Hurricanes double and triple ratings on the Weather Channel), the home owners feel they can also ride the storm out.

There's absolutely no need for a human being to cover a hurricane. All you need is a camera bolted to a building. Everybody knows that. But the weather idiot being blown to the ground doing his 'stand-up' routine has become a staple of 24-hour coverage.

National media is asking a lot of questions about the hurricane in the south and the plans the government had for disaster management. The truth is they may be overdoing analyzing a natural disaster. Professional national media still has to be ashamed at the questions they didn't have the nerve to ask about the war in Iraq. It's time to get some payback on President Bush because he made the media look like idiots with his make-believe war justifications.

OBSERVATIONS: Notre Dame football is back on WLS (890) AM on Saturday afternoons and that's a good thing. ND was on AM 1000 and they were often bumped by the White Sox.

The Sox are moving to the SCORE WSCR (670) AM and that will allow WSCR to position itself as the anti-Cub station and anti-WGN (720) AM station. Nothing works like a radio war.

Saturday afternoon radio replays of Friday night football is very enjoyable and it gives WWCA (1270) AM an edge over WJOB (1230) AM, which cannot replay prep games Saturday because it has Purdue football. WJOB replays games at 10:30 Friday, forgetting that they are at low power and few south of Route 30 can hear them at night.