Can Glitz be Good?

Three years ago, Sunbeam Television of Miami swept into Boston, taking over a moribund, perennially third-place CBS affiliate. Since then, the new WHDH-7 in Boston has made a horse race out of the ratings competition with the market's consistent leader, the ABC affiliate WCVB-5. It has won broadcast-journalism awards, including "News Station of the Year" in the Boston area in the 1996 Massachusetts Associated Press broadcast awards and a string of prizes at the New England Emmy Awards in May (although a WHDH press release failed to note that both its rivals, WCVB and WBZ, have boycotted the Emmy awards for several years). It has the dubious distinction of having been ranked No. 1 nationally on a kind of mayhem index by a media watchdog group. And it has made both of its competitors nervous enough to try some glitz-and-glitter themselves.

Some of the increase in 7's audience is attributable to a serendipitous affiliate switch in 1994 that brought WHDH to NBC and the lead-in benefit of that network's dominant prime-time lineup. Most important, though, is a bright and brassy news delivery that has challenged TV-news traditions in a city that long enjoyed reasonably good tube journalism, if not cutting-edge television.

For news people, watching Channel 7 news now can be akin to reading the National Enquirer: sensational graphics scream out, stories may be overblown or short and superficial, and there is much self-congratulation. But there is also good reporting whose virtues include creativity, aggressiveness, and immediacy.

"There is a paradox here," says Frederic M. Biddle, chief TV critic for The Boston Globe. "Sometimes channel 7 does very good work on a story-for-story basis. Seven is also guilty of some just plain bad journalism." He mentioned as an example the investigative piece, "Inside the Russian Mafia in New England," broadcast last November. "There is no Russian Mafia in New England," says Biddle. "Seven does like to scare people."

The reputation that preceded the Sunbeam team in Boston frightened many news traditionalists here. In April 1993, Sunbeam's president and owner, Edmund N. Ansin, paid $210 million for WHDH. Ansin's Miami station in recent years had become hugely popular, all the while decried by critics for its throat-grabbing news menu of crime, violence, oddity, and disaster.

Sunbeam news operations, in Miami and now Boston, are under the direction of senior vice president Joel Cheatwood, who has said he "studied MTV and VH1 for ideas." The man ultimately in charge of a recent highly promoted feature called "Celebrity High-School Yearbook Photos" also told the Globe's Ed Siegel, apparently in all seriousness, that he considers the work of his news divisions the modern-day embodiment of Edward R. Murrow. (Cheatwood declined an interview request from cjr.)

Central to the Sunbeam philosophy is the definition of local news. At WHDH, a hot local story can happen anywhere if there is a video feed for an on-the-scene Channel 7 reporter, with or without a Boston, or even New England, angle. Michael Carson, vice-president and general manager of WHDH, says, "We have the feeling that there is a stronger connection to a high-profile story if it is by a New England reporter." (WHDH had three reporters in Los Angeles covering the O.J. verdict, and got the highest local ratings.) Says the Globe's Biddle, "These people aren't getting scoops. It's a promotional tool."

WHDH does not run many stories deemed journalistically out-of-bounds by the competition -- as happens in Miami -- but does use a breathless, throbbing presentation of a story that its rivals tell with more restraint. The approach of a common, end-of-winter storm, for example, reported without fanfare on WBZ-4 (CBS) and WCVB-5 (ABC), was promoted on WHDH with a bold graphic reading, "WILD WEATHER." A health department list of eating-place closings, the kind of thing usually found in the back of newspaper metro sections, provided WHDH with a dramatically unappetizing "investigative" piece, using some ambush interviews, about the "unknown" dangers of some city restaurants.

WHDH stories are short, to keep the show moving; on some evenings, a Globe survey showed, WHDH ran four or five more stories than the competition in a given half-hour. The WHDH approach also includes considerable display of energy by reporters, who talk while walking about in a management-designed choreography. The MTV pace is part of an apparently successful design by WHDH managers to woo a younger, advertiser-friendly demographic.

One exception to the dominant on-air style is political reporter Andy Hiller, a Boston TV veteran whose work is widely respected. On camera, he appears to speak at a more refined pace than many of his station colleagues and uses substantial exposition to discuss complex issues. And he stands still. He says that Sunbeam's recognition of politics as an important, running story in Boston shows "an appreciation of the uniqueness of the market," and that his reportorial freedom is an example of "managerial flexibility," preserving some valued, traditional broadcasting style.

It's clear that the WHDH innovations, and the accompanying jump in the ratings, have had their effect on channels 4 and 5, where more sophistication has gone into graphics, the broadcast pace has speeded up, and self-promotion has intensified, although neither station has adopted 7's bomb-burst approach to story presentation.

If television news in Boston isn't as good as it used to be, no one suggests it's only because Sunbeam has come to town to degrade standards single-handedly. The Boston Globe's editor, Matthew V. Storin, says he noticed a difference when he returned to Boston in 1992, before Sunbeam's arrival, after working in several other cities for seven years. "The more serious reporters were gone" from television, he says. He also says that "you have to judge television by television -- I don't think it does any good for print people to look down their noses at anyone." In that context, he gives WHDH its due. "I credit them, if they're going to go in that direction, with being able to move the numbers. I don't agree with the way they do it, but they hustle."

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