Scraping the bottom of the barrel?

With more TV news channels now telecasting, new broadcast outfits may be scraping the bottom of the talent pool for broadcast journalists. Of late, we’ve noted that some new faces and voices on TV newscasts appear to be still wet behind the ears as they nervously make their reports.

Shouldn’t they be given more time to learn the ropes of their new occupation—away from the cameras and microphones, before they’re prematurely foisted on the hapless viewing public? —Nothing personal here, but our guiding principle must be competent service to viewers, nothing less.

Hapless exchange

Just last month, we witnessed a particularly hapless and helpless exchange between two young on-cam TV news people that underscored the seriousness of the problem:

One of them was the newscast’s anchor, even if it was clear that she was too raw to do a good job. She read the news text proficiently enough, but without much understanding or enthusiasm.

But, the situation got much worse when she got a report from the field, from a similarly jejeune reporter. She asked him to add more details to his report, and now that he was forced to ad-lib, he stammered all over the place.

To make things worse, the anchor didn’t do much better, talking herself into awkward grammatical and usage cul-de-sacs that she had a hard time extricating herself from.

After what seemed to be an interminably long time for everyone concerned, including this viewer, the awkward and embarrassing interlude finally ended—to everyone’s great relief.

Lessons learned: Don’t push new talents in front of the cameras before they’re really ready. Don’t make them news anchors long before their time. Don’t make them ad-lib in interactions with field reporters. Don’t make those similarly callow field reporters “fill in” their reports with awkward ad-libs. Just don’t!

Requirements

Our new TV news channels should do their best to get more mature people in front of the cameras. News reportage needs to be made by newscasters and reporters who look and sound reliable, objective, and worthy of the viewing public’s trust, and some youths just out of college can’t measure up to those requirements.

There’s also the problem of fitting the talent to the right show, like a channel’s early-morning news-magazine program that fields rather dour-looking and -sounding hosts. Talk about waking up not with a burst of sunshine, but with a soporific hush, this is it! Zzzzz . . .