Vic Carter bid a final farewell the other night to the tattered remains of a once-enormous WJZ-TV “Eyewitness News” audience, signaling once more the decay of a medium that seemed like the future of local journalism but now is all but irrelevant.
Carter bows out after nearly three decades at WJZ. He arrived after the deaths of Jerry Turner and Al Sanders, the two co-anchors who made that station an earth force in Baltimore at a time when TV news was shoving aside newspapers all over America as the primary source of local news.
When Turner died on that grim New Year’s Eve of 1987, Sanders became the prime anchor and Denise Koch his new partner. When Sanders died in May of 1995, it was Carter who arrived.
The station’s ratings have never been the same.
Do I blame Carter? Absolutely not.
He did what he was hired to do: he read the news of the day from a Teleprompter and hoped people would find his delivery credible, honest and, truth be told, occasionally entertaining.
There was a time when the people who ran TV news thought that would be enough — if their anchors were compelling and charismatic enough to overcome the sheer emptiness of so much of the rest of their news program.
Was Carter good enough? Last Friday evening, July 26, there were witnesses who pronounced him a pro’s pro.
Gov. Wes Moore said Carter delivered the news “not just into our living rooms, but to our hearts.”
Mayor Brandon Scott said Carter brought “dignity and respect and heart for the community.”
Rep. Kweisi Mfume said he brought “professionalism and honesty” and was “classy and sincere.”
So let’s not argue over any of this. Whatever Carter’s strengths (or weaknesses) were, he stuck around for nearly three decades, which ain’t bad.
It was his misfortune — and ours — to sit there while his station (and local news across the TV dial) was bleeding away most of the audience that once found it a daily addiction.
In the last 20 years, entire volumes have been written about the death of American newspapers. But TV news has suffered the same downfall. As someone who once worked at WJZ and at The Sun, I find all of this immensely sad.
In Turner and Sanders’ heyday at WJZ, their evening audience capped out at about half a million viewers. Today, that audience is maybe 10 percent of that, on a good night.
And the other stations have suffered the same drop, except their viewership was never as strong as WJZ’s was, back in the era when the station was the top-rated ABC affiliate in the whole country.
Today, there are lots of different ways to get the news. Hell, lots of people used to stay up for the 11 o’clock broadcast just to get the next day’s weather. Now, you just check your phone for the daily forecast.
By 11 p.m., some of us have been asleep for an hour.
But local TV never got serious about news, certainly not the way newspapers had always done it. There must be important stories to lead the TV news beyond the daily homicides or some spike in the weather.
Newspapers had beat reporters doing daily coverage of City Hall, the statehouse, the various cops and courthouses, the public and private schools. It wasn’t necessarily visual, but it was important. TV wanted dramatic pictures, whatever the story was.
The old Sun newsrooms and bureaus had more than 400 reporters, editors and photographers. There’s not a local TV news operation in Baltimore that’s ever had more than two dozen on-air people.
And that number includes a handful of weather people (they don’t do news, they do weather), a handful of sports people (they don’t do news, they do sports), and anchor people, who don’t spend their days digging up the news they report.
They read it from a Teleprompter.
And the last time lots of viewers thought that was enough, Jerry Turner and Al Sanders were the ones doing the reading.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator,Michael Olesker is the author of seven books,including “Tonight at 6: A Daily Show Masquerading as Local TV News” (Apprentice House).
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