NBC News – Pot Calling The Newspaper Kettle Black!

Philip Stone July 9, 2008

NBC News with Brian Williams on Tuesday night ran a piece about the distress in the newspaper industry and it was right on – it talked about the bad goings on in Palm Beach, Florida (300 fired) but also the good, Mort Zuckerman’s $150 million investment in new color presses for the New York Daily News. All in all, a fair balanced piece.

But what caught this writer’s eye more than that story was that for two nights in a row, with a summit of the eight largest economies in the world meeting in Japan there was no NBC reporter doing a stand-up to camera.

On Monday night’s broadcast the network ran a few seconds of video showing President Bush and the Japanese Prime Minister at a news conference. And that was that.

Tuesday night it was time to talk about the G8’s environment decision but that report was given by Ann Thompson, chief environmental affairs correspondent, in New York – there was agency video from the meeting interspersed with interviews from environmentalists but again no stand-up report from Japan.

To an old-timer like this writer it really is unbelievable that the top rated US network news broadcast handles a summit of eight of the world’s most powerful leaders like this. In days gone by the network’s White House correspondent and probably a couple of others would have done stand-ups covering all angles, got exclusive interviews with most of the participants – a good opportunity, for instance, to interview the new Russian President -- there would have been multiple camera crews, producers etc., but this week it was agency video and audio from New York.

It’s not that what the leaders had to say in Japan wasn’t important; apparently it’s a matter of NBC News spending the money these days to cover such an international event. And yes to do Japan properly would have been expensive. Obviously, it’s a lot cheaper to cover events close to home, but does that really satisfy the network’s social responsibility to its viewers?

Recently Brian Williams took the newscast to Afghanistan – about time there had been some coverage from there – but special coverage like that, and what it must have cost,  doesn’t replace the day in, day out international coverage that there should be from around the world. There’s always the old adage that Americans don’t care about international news—well if that is true then how come Americans make up more than 50% of the readers of UK newspaper web sites, known for the comprehensive foreign coverage?

NBC has been using more and more coverage from the British ITN – covering the Zimbabwe election, for instance -- and it is becoming increasingly obvious the network has hardly anyone on the international ground. And that must be what several severe budgets cuts have done to that news organization.

So, it’s all well and good that the network ran a piece Tuesday night on the calamity that is hitting the newspaper industry today, but that’s a glass house that NBC News is living in. Ratings may be ok, profits might be fine, but journalistically don’t let anyone fool you – what you see today, at least on the international stage, is a mere shadow of the coverage that Huntley and Brinkley, John Chancellor, and even Tom Brokaw in the early days would have been proud.  When you cutback coverage that much it does get noticed, even if people don’t say anything.