Making the Most of the Medium

All too often, across the U.S., television's local news coverage veers from dull to deplorable. Bumptious reporters shove microphones into faces and ask inane questions, and cameras are trained interminably on fires and auto accidents. Few are the electronic journalists who make the most of their medium's exciting possibilities. Those that do, though, point the way not only for their local colleagues but also for their big-time rivals on the networks.

Perhaps no station has done more journalistic pioneering than New Orleans' WDSU-TV. Owned by Edgar B. Stern Jr., a major stockholder in Sears, Roebuck, WDSU begins with a built-in advantage: it can afford to budget some $400,000 a year for TV news coverage. And most of WDSU's 18 reporters have had experience in other kinds of journalism--an unusual state of affairs in any TV news department. News Director John Corporon, 37, who served as U.P.I, bureau chief in New Orleans, has a wire-service fascination with fastbreaking stories plus a balancing lack of hesitance about releasing staffers for months on stories requiring spadework and research.

Cameras with Heat. On spot news stories, few other newsmen in the area move as fast as the reporters from WDSU. When the plane carrying former New Orleans Mayor deLesseps Morrison failed to land on schedule, Corporon wasted not a moment. He chartered a plane, sent out a reporter and cameraman to retrace Morrison's route. WDSU had the only New Orleans reporters at the crash scene and shot the city's only film of the removal of the bodies.

The station's newsmen have done the kind of investigative reporting any news paper could envy. While covering the death of a woman who had just been released from a city hospital, a WDSU reporter decided to check on the home where she had been living, found that it had been condemned as unfit for human habitation, and that the landlord was a member of the mayor's committee on housing. A WDSU team then toted their cameras to the landlord's other properties, put so much heat on him that he lost his city job. Last year WDSU staffers visited a new, all-white private school supported by tuition grants from the state legislature in an effort to circumvent integration. They discovered that the school was so broke that it was unlikely to survive for a year. They also filmed the school's many fire and health violations. It was forced to close.

Squelching Rumors. Few other local stations can match the consistent quality of WDSU's news shows. But there are those that try and their number is growing. A sampling of their successes:

> Salt Lake City's KUTV put together a documentary on local vice, including interviews with prostitutes, pimps, addicts and juvenile delinquents. So thoroughly was the seamy side of the city uncovered that its Mormon population was shocked. The show is now rerun regularly in sociology courses at the universities of Utah and Brigham Young.

> Seattle's KING-TV saw an important story in the apprehension that spread through the city last spring when a group of Russian fishing vessels was sighted off the coast. Instead of merely repeating the frightening rumors, KING sent a reportorial team aboard one of the trawlers. After two days of filming the ordinary life aboard the ship, the null were able to convince viewers that there was no conspiracy afloat.

> Atlanta's WSB-TV provided such thorough coverage of last month's firemen's strike that station personnel brought the firemen and Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. together for coffee and persuaded them to accept outside mediation. The firemen even cheered WSB reporters--a fact duly and proudly reported by WSB.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.