THOMAS LARSON

(Times of San Diego August 2, 2024)

As a journalist and critic, I revise my work constantly whether in longform articles, personal essays, or a quickie on Twitter where I worry over the post a while, wince a bit, and send it. Of my crafted prose, I’ll draft a piece a dozen times, recast dozens of paragraphs, recalibrate and move dozens more sentences while phrases and words by the hundreds get cut, altered, rethought, and, if necessary, brought back from their burial ground. “All the writing matters,” the novelist Frank Conroy said.

I’ve noticed (for years) the opposite of the writer’s verbal practice is the lazy summaries and word salads of live TV reporters, especially the national outlets and especially during election years. Many in the profession strangle the language with clichés and bore us with fatuous analysis. Their so-called skill is to talk “off the cuff,” whose relationship to thoughtful journalism baffles me.

On-scene reporters often direct us away from their words and toward what the camera sees, a kind of Mickey-Mouse maneuver, allowing the mic-holding-person to wing it. Here’s a not uncommon description of a northern California wildfire: “If you look behind me at this, you can see that the smoke is going up there on and it’s hard to tell just how soon the firefighters can get a handle on this.”

This has no clear referent, and it needs a concrete noun to boldly inform viewers who are also listening to the commentary. How about: “With this blaze, the smoke is billowing wildly on the western slope of the mountain. Evening, coming in two hours, will damp down the fire, cool off the embers, give firefighters a rest, and may stop these 40 acres of inflamed scrub brush from advancing any further.” Is that so difficult for an on-scene reporter to learn?

Such moments—rising waters, hurricane-force winds, overturned trucks spilling chemicals on an Interstate, crouching under gunfire with bombs popping off in the background, 3 a.m. in Tel Aviv—are loaded with drama and lend themselves to the marvels of sense-filled commentary. For the sharpest international TV reporting, listen to the literarily alive language of Nic Robertson on CNN, reporting the War in Gaza, Clarissa Ward’s grievous interviews with Ukrainian women, and Nick Paton Walsh, the most brilliant full-paragraph shaper of ideas and information about the intelligence community.

Fresh-faced TV correspondents are rarely students of the English language; they should have avoided J-school and Communications and read Literature in college. I swear it seems the new crop of national correspondent is an aliterate bunch. They can read but don’t. One dead giveaway is that they compulsively check their phones as if more info will burnish their speech. Crisp nouns and action verbs sound original and put the curiosity of the individual into the mix, whether uttered on the spot or at a news desk. (A fine shaper of on-air sentences is Thomas Friedman, probably because of his writing chops.)

I realize TV is a visual medium. But, as I say, it’s also auditory. Here, I note eight common clichés and stale tropes, which, in my hearing, too many live reporters commit. I offer these in the hope of stimulating an audience’s interest and lessening the newsperson’s disregard for our Mother Tongue.

1. Don’t trust TV people who say, “according to a senior official in the [blank],” “after speaking with several close advisors, the Secretary is weighing his options after being briefed on the [blank] . . ..” This is the fallacy of the unnamed source; the reporter protects her contacts, of course. But the constant mention of the anonymous source is, after a while, specious. How do we know that the source is telling the truth or playing the TV newsman for a fool? He said, she said, source-and-reporter style.

2. Don’t trust anyone whose coverage punts the story: “No word yet, Lester,” or “She’ll have more to say tomorrow,” or “Time will tell,” or “We’ll see how this plays out,” or “We reached out for comment but haven’t heard anything.” That’s not storytelling or analysis; that’s a painfully slow news day designed by news directors to get the viewer, anyway they can, to the commercial.

3. Don’t accept TV mic-holding-persons who use “we” as a causal agent, as in “We are emitting more carbon dioxide than ever,” or drop the sloppy, after-hours time stamp, “Tonight” or “At this hour.” “At this hour police have no suspects,” implying that they will, and soon, capture the criminal because, stations have elevated the police to competent investigators. Really? People get away with murder, fraud, abuse all the time. Another gem is “law enforcement are following developments closely.” Isn’t it obvious that the inquiry is ongoing because if someone had been arrested, then that would be the story?

More grinding stupidity is the current: “Candidates are jockeying for the VP [Vice President] nod.” An inept comparison: It’s not a “nod”; it’s a seriously vetted decision wresting on policy and interpersonal comfort. “Candidates” are neither “running” nor “jockeying,” the latter term associated with horse racing where riders fight off jockeys beside them and punish their horses. Just last night I heard a CNN reporter say, “after Joe Biden was pushed out by Democrat elites.” And you know this how?

4. Don’t trust news networks who profile the indeterminate some: “In a moment we’ll hear from some Arizona voters for their reaction to [blank]” and, after the break, the segment amounts to three people in a diner each of whom witlessly remarks something witless—like Kari Lake’s jewel, “There were plenty of election irregularities in 2020.” Three voters plus Lake beggars the notion that this group speaks for even some Arizona voters. Not some. “Some” is a roll of the dice, a manufactured nonentity, and not news. Why network and cable TV routinely put this over on viewers wastes space and time. Such stories should come with warnings like on cigarette packs: “This report has little to no validity.”

5. Disregard overnight polls, in use constantly these days. (Who answers the phone late at night?) They are screenshots, not trends or thoughtfully weighed measures. If polls are statistically close, new anchors are told to say it’s “within the margin of error.” That’s the sort of weaseling most watchers see through: “Kamala Harris is ahead by two points, a statistical toss-up.” Non-news news is irksome; it proves a reporter failed to uncover anything worthwhile. In addition, turn off the desperate sorts who cite one poll. Trump up by 11; switch channel; Harris up by 7. Go to 538.com and you’ll find surveys in the aggregate, which, if we leave the Hillary Clinton debacle out of it, can be fairly accurate.

6. Newscasters don’t use God, the fates, destiny, Revelation, as sources. But they do trade in other equally inane figures of speech. The supposed worst thing a politician can do is “flip-flop” on an issue. Though beloved, the “flip-flopper” line contains no qualification. To counter, you say OK, Trump loved the Clintons and the Democrats. So what? People grow, change, mature (sometimes) because of experience, not because they’re deceivers, though outright lying has been normalized. But the motivation behind a changed position is impossible to prove; it’s easily rationalized. Will Vance’s statement that Trump is “America’s Hitler,” which he’s taken back and now thinks his boss has undergone a saintly makeover, matter? Not to Trump’s base.

7. Just because many talking heads have exposure on TV, YouTube, and podcasts, the War Room with Steve Bannon or “Hour of Power” with Bobby Schuller, doesn’t mean they deliver opinions with rhetorical skill, elegant imagery, or original metaphors. Their bailiwick is to harangue, and they can be “good” at it. Propagandists reveal themselves with non-sequiturs, bravado, Alex Jones-style screaming, tears of sincerity, and fever-dream wishes for what can’t happen. Feeling over fact.

And then there’s the Garble Queen of Fox News, Harris Faulkner. After Trump’s debacle at the confab of black journalists this week, famous now for his slights against Harris’s blackness, here’s some of what Faulkner said to Hannity who asked if he was hearing people cheering for him: “You’re not wrong. There were people listening closely enough to catch his humor. He’s funny. . . . at one point talking about energy and drill, baby, drill, and really going after that sector, and making things cheaper in that sector . . . making living cheaper to do, with quality reserves . . ..” Huh? Huh? Such dissembling epitomizes her verbal disability—a regular Sarah Palin—saying nothing while thinking out loud of what to say. Most galling to the many broke reporters who value the skill of live speech, Faulkner makes $2 million a year.

You want elegance and reason, cogent thoughts and expressive elán when speaking live, get an earful of John McWhorter, Sam Harris, and Meghan Daum, heterodox podcasters whose discussions between host and guest sound scripted. Add in James Carville, who talks with Southern color and charmed sense, and I perk up like a spring daisy.

8. Last, even though my list may underscore the news as “fake,” that descriptor (still) makes no sense. “Fake” suggests that reporters and their overlords put facts through a “lie grinder,” where, like lean beef, out slithers biases and distortions. Jettison the term “fake.” It’s a ploy because the news is now, more than ever, carnivalesque—not nuanced but showy, not issue-driven but celebrity-bent—which even written reportage reflects.

Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy stresses his growing up with Kentucky and Ohio “hillbillies” and their drug addiction; it’s the worst popular memoir I’ve ever read. (You want a great pop autobiography: Mommie Dearest.) Vance’s reporting on the hillbilly trades on an Appalachian who was one only geographically. His memoir is, like the news, carnivalesque in its caricatures because he portrays the poor as victims of Democratic policies, a way of making himself seem their defense counsel. (News to me that Democrats brought Oxycontin to Kentucky.)

If hillbilly has any true meaning, it’s as a class of people who lack education and job opportunities, remain in dependent cycles of poverty, and elect people who do nothing for them. There’s no love lost between Vance and his tough-love homeland. He pulls up his britches and skedaddles—scholarship to Ohio State, law school at Yale, clerking for a U.S. District Court judge, profiteering at a venture capitalist firm, and penning an opportunistic memoir. To me that’s the resume of a hillbilly manqué.

Mic-holding-persons have little idea how much the language awaits their curiosity with its literary, narrative, and personal rewards for speaking with the aplomb of a writer. Last nugget of advice: When you arrive on scene or report after the event, jot down words for images and smells, for any tension or conflict your antennae pick up. Use your senses to listen, touch, and notice the non-obvious, then give verbal equivalents to viewers for what they are not seeing and not hearing. The contrast will astound your audience.