November
18, 2004: Investigative Shows Banned
By
The Diesel
Sacramento, CA
The BMTG does not endorse the viewing of any of the following news shows:
20/20
48 hours
60 minutes
60 minutes II
Dateline NBC
PrimeTime Live
Most of the "News Magazines" on television tout themselves as legitimate investigative news shows, but in reality, a majority of their stories are the same sensationalized stories we have seen repeated for years. There are so many of these shows that it is impossible to know if you're watching one instead of the other and since there isn't anything to differentiate them, it really doesn't matter.
Popular themes of these shows include:
Quintuplets
– It’s always the same questions and video as we get to see a
team of babies/toddlers prance about the house and cause lots of work for
their parents. The parents always rattle off mind-boggling statistics such
as they go through 75 diapers a day or they have to work in exhaustive shifts.
This is such inane filler that stories about Pandas
who refuse to mate to save their own species sound like a better alternative.
Dishonest Car Mechanics - These are typically staged with a naïve acting woman who has a camera hidden in her hat telling the mechanic that her car is making a weird sound. The car was inspected prior to taking it to the mechanic and engine parts were coated with a substance only able to be seen under a black light. In addition, the show loosened an engine wire to cause the engine to sputter slightly. The greedy mechanic quickly fixes the loose wire, yet charges the seemingly naïve lady (usually the show's producer), who now asks plenty of specific questions, lots of money for parts that he never replaced. When the investigative reporter confronts the mechanic or shop owner with a handheld television that has the hidden video playing, the reaction is always the same with the culprit refusing to talk. If the studio is laid out in such a manner that the host sits near the reporter after the piece ends, the host will invariably ask, "How can we avoid these criminals?" The reporter's reply is always a basic lesson in common sense and can be repeated verbatim by most viewers. They should just run these on News Magazine Classic as we've seen the same exact story many times. They could even have a 24-hour marathon on dishonest car mechanics and still not include all of the times the story was done.
Surprise
Criminal - Almost weekly, there is a story about a person who commits
a crime that no one saw coming. The doctor who is an arsonist, the preacher
who killed his wife, or the professional who destroys his own condo. The stories
repeat themselves year after year and the only change is the faces of the
criminals and sometimes the reporter doing the story. It’s best to just
Tivo through these stories as all the information reported in the first five
minutes will be contradicted after the commercial break. "He seemed to
have everything…He even saved a man who…(commercial)…no
one knew of his dark secret…. how could this man who so many knew….
as a teenager he…. (commercial)…and then the prosecution dropped
a bombshell…his first wife testified that…. we’ll tell you
the verdict next…(commercial)". Repeat every week and rinse.
Stains - The story about the unseen stains in hotel rooms is also extremely popular. The investigative reporter will rent a room at a hotel chain. Which one? A major one. Then they will spray the room with a substance that law enforcement uses to reveal blood and other stains that cannot be easily seen. Once the room is completely sprayed, the lights are turned off and the black light is turned on. The typical result is a room that is dramatically illuminated by the various stains. It's never revealed the number of rooms that were tested before the horrific display, but the impression is that it is only a handful. While this story does make viewers aware of disgusting rooms at otherwise perfectly clean hotels, it too has been done way too often. Once you are told that people rub their privates on the room coffee mugs and the feces on the remote controls are 10X higher than the feces on your remote at home you tend not to forget.
While
all of the investigative reporters bring their own style and level of sensationalism
to the table, 20/20 reporter John Quinones (who resembles a steroid bloated
Jerry Lewis) is the official court jester. A favorite technique of Mr. Quinones
is to walk towards the camera while a television, playing the same video of
him talking, is in the background. During key points, the camera moves away
from him and towards the television until it consumes the entire screen. Occasionally,
the television is tilted slightly attempting to give it that guerrilla documentary
feel. While the camera tricks come off as juvenile, Quinones continues to
look sternly into the camera and emphasize the latest twist in his story.
Quinones has a knack for covering a wide range of stories while making them
all sound the same, from the Yonomamo Indians to homeless children in Bogota
to illegal aliens in Mexico to Haitian boat people to the Congo's virgin rainforest.
Same story, different backdrop.
Sometimes
these news shows, leading us to believe that they have hordes of researchers
and investigators uncovering every detail, still manage to get the facts completely
wrong. 60 Minutes and Dan Rather are the most recent example of this with
their fabricated evidence concerning President Bush and his military record.
Rather let his Liberal leanings influence his work to such an extent that
the story, which he hoped was true, was not properly validated. What else
has Rather misled us about? He has proven to be more akin to the political
spin-doctors than an honest newsman such as Walter Cronkite, currently the
thirdbasemen for the Chicago Choirboys. Not so long ago, Rather was responsible
for several minutes of dead air because he was angered at having to wait until
a sporting event was over before his newscast began. Again, for Rather the
story is secondary to himself and his beliefs.
A few years ago, 60 Minutes was caught sensationalizing a story about the safety of the cars of a large automaker when in an accident at a certain speed. 60 Minutes aired footage of cars being smashed into walls followed by a terrifying explosion caused by the inappropriately positioned gas tank. Unfortunately for 60 Minutes, the manufacturer disputed their findings and it was eventually uncovered that 60 Minutes had rigged the cars to explode on impact. What else has 60 minutes misled us about?
The
serious, yet playful, Diane Sawyer was caught in her own web of lies when
she did a story on the poor cleaning procedures at a chain grocery store deli.
The story, as edited by Diane Sawyer and her team, showed that the grocery
store deli did not wash their equipment regularly and that it sold the same
highly spoilable products, such as potato salad, well beyond their expiration
date. The video, some of it hidden, showed customers being misled into thinking
the food products were fresh. Diane's creative editing took out video that
showed the equipment was cleaned on a regular basis and the expired items
in the deli were either fresh or soon removed from the sales floor. The only
reason Diane and the others came clean was because the grocery store had made
their own video at the same time Diane and her team were filming theirs. The
grocery store video, when showed unedited, gave damming evidence that Dateline
had purposefully misled their viewers. What else has Diane Sawyer misled us
about?
While occasionally, these shows will have a unique hard hitting story on Kirstie Alley or the final episode of Friends, the BMTG feels that time is better spent wiffling. If you can't help yourself and feel the urge to watch one of these shows just close your eyes and remember the last show you saw. Now change the names of the people in the story and their locations. You have now just seen about 90% of what you missed. To make up the remaining 10%, again close your eyes, pick a successful corporation, make false claims about the quality of its products, think of a child or panda getting hurt by the product, pretend you have secret footage, declare a global crisis, end scene.