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As is customary with any filibuster story, CBS' Jeff Greenfield illustrated his report with a clip from Frank Capra's movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Greenfield showed us Jimmy Stewart in order to tell us that this is not what a filibuster looks like. This leads us to a quiz. What do the following movies have in common?
The Bank Job
The Birds
Ghostbusters
Mr Smith Goes to Washington
Rudy
Waterworld
Answer: in the last four days all six of these fictions have been used by ABC to cover actual news stories. Match the fictional title with factual stories filed by Erin Hayes, the BBC's Nick Bryant, anchor Diane Sawyer, David Muir, Sharyn Alfonsi and John Berman. Astonishingly, in two of these cases the movie was invoked precisely in order to tell the viewer that the story being covered had nothing to do with the scene depicted.
Hey ABC! You are a news division! Try actuality footage not Hollywood fantasy for your storytelling.
The ABC World News producers are amateurs compared with their counterparts at NBC Nightly News. Without a doubt, Nightly News is the industry leader when it comes to using movie, TV and commercial clips in their evening newscast. By my count, in 2010, Nightly News used TV, movie or commercial clips in 110 of their 347 broadcasts. (Keep in mind that many of these broadcasts used multiple clips in different stories. For example, the May 24 broadcast managed to include clips from "Blackhawk Down", "A League of Their Own" and "Law & Order".) At the beginning of the year, "Avatar" and "Up In The Air" clips were among the Nightly News favorites. Later in the year, "Inception", "The Social Network" and "The King's Speech" were popular. (Often, clips were featured simply because Brian Williams liked the movie or TV show. On Nov. 10, two different Nightly News stories featured clips from "Mad Men"--one of Brian's favorite shows.) On April 5 and April 8, Nightly News used two different Gene Hackman clips for completely different stories. (On April 5, they used a clip of Hackman in "Hoosiers" as part of a story about Butler University in the NCAA Final Four. Three days later, they used a clip of Hackman in "Crimson Tide" during a story about a smoking ban in Navy subs.) Of course, the TV clips they use are predominantly from NBC shows like "Saturday Night Live", "30 Rock", "The Office" and Jay Leno's and Jimmy Fallon's shows. After all, what's the purpose of having a news broadcast if you can't use it to promote NBC entertainment shows (or DVDs)? When "Law & Order" was cancelled, Nightly News did four separate stories about it, all of which included clips from the show. Any time a former NBC TV star died (such as Merlin Olsen, Rue McClanahan, Pernell Roberts or Robert Culp) Nightly News featured TV clips during their obituaries because these shows' DVDs are still available for sale at the NBC/Universal store. Certain movies
(continued) were featured on Nightly News (such as from the "Harry Potter" series or "The Blues Brothers") because they promote rides or events at Universal Studios theme parks. Of course, one of the main reasons why Nightly News showed film or movie clips was for the purpose of promoting NBC/Universal properties. But another reason is simply to maintain the viewers' attention. People are more likely to stay tuned (and to tune in again in the future) when they are bombarded by a constant stream of movie and TV clips. "Oh look, George Clooney!"; "Hey, that's Betty White on 'SNL'!"; "Cool--another 'Seinfeld' clip!" Brian Williams, Steve Capus and their producers know that even during a newscast, people would much rather see entertainment than news. During a Dec. 18 Nightly News story about Amelia Earhart, they made sure to show superfluous clips from the "Amelia" movie that starred Hilary Swank, despite the fact that the story also featured a significant amount of actual Earhart footage. They didn't really need to show the movie clips, but of course they still did. Pandering to the viewers' love of entertainment is just one of the ways Nightly News manages to remain the #1 rated newscast. It's all part of NBC's strategy to make Nightly News indistinguishable from the shows that follow it: "Extra" and "Access Hollywood".
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