THE "D" IN DAYTIME TALK SHOWS STANDS FOR "DEAD"

  A variety of factors are conspiring to suck the life out of a television staple.  

Media commentary by Doug Spero via The Huffington Post

Daytime talk on TV is dead!  Well, maybe not dead, but it is going the way of westerns, game shows and teenage bandstands. Littered across the daytime talk landscape are the has-beens and colossal failures from the past.

This scene is full of graveyard greats like Ricki Lake, Jeff Probst, Anderson Cooper, Wayne Brady, Martin Short and many others who folded up shop in recent years. But there's one talent that's signaled it may be time to call in the priest for last rites: Katie Couric. 

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A-MAZ'IN - AND VIRTUALLY UNSTUMPABLE

Remembering New York sports broadcasting legend Bill Mazer, dead at 92

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

The Boston Red Sox won their ninth consecutive World Series game last night.  Who was the last team to do that? 

Today, you can just call up the answer on your smartphone.  But in an era before information became as ubiquitous as tap water, there was a far more authoritative way to get a reliable answer:  just ask Bill Mazer.

Bill Mazer (left) with Steve Dunlop on the Challenge Round on New York's Ten O'Clock News, 1990.  Image courtesy WNYW-TV. 

I had the privilege of working with the man they called "The A-Maz-in'" for the better part of a decade in New York at The Ten O'Clock News on Channel 5.  He was a genial, avuncular conversationalist who sang opera in the newsroom (although he actually preferred the acoustics in the men's room)  and who would yell out "Stevie!  Boychik!"  with a smile when he passed me in the hallway.   I never knew what that Yiddishism meant until Mazer taught me the term. 

But for members of my generation, Bill Mazer and sports trivia were virtually synonymous.  He might as well have invented the field.   He certainly invented the sports radio call-in show. 

I first encountered him as a kid of about 9, on our kitchen radio, listening to his afternoon call-in program on WNBC called "The Challenge Round."   My parents, both transplants from the Buffalo area where Mazer had spent 16 prior years as a sportscaster, were already well acquainted with his near-photographic recall. 

"The first call was a kid," Mazer told Newsday in 2011, reflecting on how it all began.  "And he said, 'I just want to ask you one question.' I said, 'OK, go ahead.'  He said, 'Who's better: Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle?" 

The Sports Answer Book, authored by Bill Mazer in the 1960's.   

That's asking for an opinion, of course, not a fact.  But Mazer's knowledge of sports facts was so encyclopedic that he wrote a book on the subject that you can still find on Amazon.   (Sorry, my copy is not for sale.) 

Mazer was no sports geek, however.  In the late 1960's, he moved to WOR Radio, where he hosted a nightly interview program from The Steer Palace, an upscale steakhouse near Madison Square Garden.   On WOR, Mazer and his guest would entertain subject matter ranging from the arts to politics to music to popular culture.  

Mazer was a radio producer's dream.  Just wind him up and point him toward the microphone.  But unlike most of today's non-stop talkers, Mazer was a Renaissance man.  He could address virtually any topic with intelligence, civility, and depth.  He was a sports guy for people who didn't necessarily care for sports.  

And it was that ability to cast a wider net that led to his hiring at Channel 5, as my longtime Ten O'Clock News colleague Christopher Jones told me. 

"Mark Monsky was the news director and he was looking for a sports guy," Jones said, "but Monsky was a news guy with little interest in sports." Jones, who listened to Mazer on the radio, was deeply impressed by how he handled stumper questions live, and suggested that Monsky hire him. 

"I told Monsky that Mazer could keep viewers watching the sports segment, even when they didn't particularly care about sports - and that included Monsky," Jones told me.  "Monsky called Mazer.  The rest is history." 

One night in the summer of 1990, I was anchoring the Ten O'Clock News alongside Bill Mazer.  Sports was the last segment.  Mazer was running long, as he usually did, and floor manager Donna Hayes was waving frantically at him to wrap so we would have time for the Challenge Round. 

Mazer brushed Donna off with a wave of his hand, and just kept reading his script at his normal pace, as though nothing had happened.   No one at home saw it - and probably not even any one in the control room.  

The question I read to the A-Maz-in was from a Joe Niehardt in Middle Village, Queens.  "When Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941," I asked him, "Joe DiMaggio hit .357 to finish third in batting that year.  Who finished second?" 

"I know the guy," Mazer responded without hesitation.  "I saw him play shortstop for Washington.  His name was Cecil Travis.  He batted, what?  .359?"

Bill Mazer got it right, of course.  Even the batting average.  That didn't surprise me.  What surprised me was how he could handle both an unexpected question and the pressure of the clock - just by staying focused, doing his unique thing, and by being as warm and engaging on-camera as he was in person. 

You can't do that by pretending to be someone else - which is what too many people on TV do these days.  "What you see is what you get," Mazer once told me about his delivery style. 

By the way… we got off the air on time. 

THE Un-CEO

Unlike many so-called leaders of our time, Pope Francis does not regurgitate processed bromides that fall on deaf ears.

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Don Hewitt, the brash, irrepressible creator of 60 Minutes whom I've written about elsewhere in the Press Center over the years, had a mantra for his staff that set the tone for the most successful newsmagazine in history.   

The mantra is harsh, even arrogant - but it cuts to the heart of what news actually is. 

"Tell me something," Hewitt argued," that I don't already know." 

In that pithy phrase, under the veneer of self-importance, lies the key to media coverage of last week's historic interview of Pope Francis.   But the lessons apply far beyond the religious realm.  Professional communicators from all walks of life, and especially from organizations under fire, should take heed. 

Pope Francis's interview was published in America, the magazine of the Jesuit order in the United States.   

The secular press widely reported Francis's comments that the Catholic Church had become "obsessed" with a "disjointed multitude of doctrines" on abortion, contraception, and gay issues, and needed to broaden its agenda in order to engage effectively with the rest of the world. 

Liberals cheered.  Moderates welcomed a fresh take on vexing concerns.  Conservatives protested that the pontiff had been taken out of context.  Still others contended that with a poor choice of words, Francis had naively undercut his own American bishops' defense of church teachings (to the point of said obsession). 

It's the critics who are naive, folks.  Pope Francis knows exactly what he is doing. 

Despite his proclivity for speaking almost entirely without notes - or, more likely, because of it - he has become the most quotable pope that the modern world has ever seen.   And all without the help of "handlers."  Francis himself is the author of this fundamental shift. 

Here are some recent Francis-isms that haven't gotten as much attention as the "obsessed" comment, because the topics they address are not prominent on the media's radar.  Note the shockingly original use of metaphors and analogies:

•  On vanity:  "Look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them."

•  On lukewarm priests:  "(When a priest) doesn’t put his own skin and own heart on the line, he never hears a warm, heartfelt word of thanks… this is precisely the reason why some priests grow dissatisfied, lose heart and become in a sense collectors of antiquities or novelties — instead of being shepherds, living with the smell of the sheep."

•  On himself.  At one point in the recent interview, he is bluntly asked, "who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio (his lifelong name)?… He nods and replies: "I  do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”

You can agree or disagree with the content of those quotes - but not the form.  As anyone in the communications field knows, good sound bites are rarely accidents.   Pope Francis is more media savvy than any of his critics believed.  

In the end, when the media jump on the "obsessed" angle, they are doing what they have always done.  They are reacting as Don Hewitt would - to something they "don't already know."   Who, after all, could have imagined the Bishop of Rome opining that the Church had become obsessed with sex?  

You might as well say Michael Jackson was obsessed with child molestation.   At one point years ago, that too was unimaginable.  But that revelation, when it emerged, also created headlines.  Which is precisely the point. 

This fundamental reality about the nature of news - that as human beings we find the unexpected far more interesting than the merely bold - explains the failure of many costly media campaigns.   

Your company takes a "strong stand" for "sustainability?"  Ho-hum.    Get in line, because that's utterly predictable. 

You are "focused like a laser beam" on "creating shareholder value?"  Welcome to the club.   Next?

The eyes of reporters and bloggers glaze over when press releases tout the next "end-to-end solution." We've heard it all before. 

But tell me something I truly don't already know?  Now, you've hooked me. 

Pope Francis sets an example.  He deserves credit for surprising us, intriguing us.   Unlike so many so-called leaders of our time, he does not regurgitate processed bromides that fall on deaf ears.  He makes news, and reaches hearts and minds, with a deliberately provocative choice of words. 

Yet the fact that it makes news doesn't reside just in those words - but in the fact that we did not already know a pope would ever say them. 

WHEN NEWS TRAVELS TOO FAST: The dangers of media speed

"We are being taught through social media responses to react as fast and as loud as possible – much to everyone's detriment," writes a teacher of ethics and critical thinking at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.  The "haste of acquiring information," says Tauriq Moosa, is "detrimental to proper responses, let alone proper reporting." 

Former Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg (left) and Dunlop Media's Charles Feldman, formerly of CNN (right), discuss the dangers of media speed at the 2009 Global Travel and Tourism Summit.   

Moosa agrees with Dunlop Media specialist Charles Feldman, who expressed similar sentiments in a recent book on the subject.  "The public's right to know," said Feldman, "has been supplanted by the public's right to know everything, however fanciful and even erroneous, as fast as technology allows."  Courtesy The Guardian. 

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TV NEWS FAILED EVERYONE IN THE ZIMMERMAN CASE

RALEIGH, NC:  Broadcast coverage was relentless during and after the nationally televised trial of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin.  Veteran journalist and college lecturer Doug Spero, a Dunlop Media associate, monitored the output - and couldn't believe what he saw. 

George Zimmerman, who was acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin, in a still image from a video provided by Sanford, Florida, police.   

"What we have had here is an acute case of agenda-style infotainment," Spero wrote in a nationally published op-ed piece.  "Pioneering TV journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite would, no doubt, be horrified. "   Courtesy The Christian Science Monitor. 

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