Monday, December 15, 2003

As the television set blared on past the usual "24" cliffhanger, the nightly news team spun out a few little cliffhangers of its own. Such "teases" have become standard news practice, but this time an affable-looking man promised that if I'd stay tuned, he'd tell me how to "get in Pamela Anderson's pants."

What?

And that was pretty much the reaction on air. The camera switched from the smiling man, Morris Jones, to a startled Sheila Hyland, who stammered something like, "Well, OK" and launched the local news with as much normalcy as possible.

Hyland, as the Fox 53 Web site notes, "has been a fixture in Pittsburgh television for 15 years." Jones, however, anchors a news desk from Sinclair Broadcast Group's corporate headquarters near Baltimore, Md. With this "News Central" hybrid of local and national staff, Sinclair promises to bring Pittsburgh viewers "the best of both worlds -- your local news and national news every night."

But does the best of both worlds include directions to Pamela Anderson's pants?

I expect that kind of nonsense from a Fox 53 "Friends" re-run -- and worse from newer "Friends" episodes on NBC -- but not from my late local news, where, so far, some sense of decorum and respect for community standards prevails.

Sinclair, a publicly traded corporation and Fox 53's owner, already had terminated local news at many of its 63 stations before launching News Central nationwide in October 2002. With the News Central format, Sinclair now distributes national news and weather from a centralized location and adds a dollop of local coverage with skeletal staffs.

At Pittsburgh's Fox 53, 11 of about 40 employees were axed to make way for the News Central format in April. But employees who survived the cuts may continue to suffer for bad decisions made far away from here, because local viewers are, to quote Yogi Berra, "staying away in droves."

November's Nielsen ratings show that WPGH has lost about one-fifth of its news audience since the changeover. That fact, which says good things about Pittsburghers' judgment, spells trouble for Sinclair, and deservedly so. Sinclair's leaders have failed to fully observe the time-honored description of capitalism: "enlightened self-interest." They've sought profits without regard for Pittsburgh consumers' wishes. That's not very enlightened. And it's bad business.

Sinclair CEO David Smith claims that its less costly, nonlocal news operation allows "even the smaller markets ... to support a profitable yet high-quality newscast." Yet the cities where Sinclair had eliminated local news and now pretends to be coming to the rescue include big markets such as Winston-Salem, N.C., and St. Louis, which do have profitable local news operations affiliated with other, more venerable networks. It is possible to respect a community and still make money. In fact, the two go together, as Fox 53's ratings decline demonstrates in reverse.

After Tuesday night's especially violent episode of "24" (Jack Bauer may have lost me with the Russian roulette), News Central's Jones flacked some upcoming stories. One involved the sheriff's department in Eagle County, Colo., site of the Kobe Bryant trial, where deputies bought T-shirts that feature a hangman on front and disparaging remarks about Bryant on the back.

And what was Jones' tease? "If the shirt fits, you must acquit." These words aired before 10:10 p.m. I watched for 20 more minutes -- through stories on murdered federal prosecutor Jonathan Luna, Sen. Paul Simon's death, Congress' budget bill failure and eight other topics -- but I never found out how an altered O.J. Simpson reference could possibly pertain to the Kobe Bryant trial. The segment may have aired, but I ran out of patience.

I did learn, however, that 66 percent of us would not approve of a presidential candidate using the "f" word.

Sinclair is packaging its product to appeal to the typical viewer of Fox network's racier content. That's why we have to endure seedy references to a sex star's pants. This is, pardon the expression, bottom-feeding.

Wise viewers here are escaping to more hospitable parts of the pond.

E-mail this story   Print this story