Smile and wave. You're probably on camera. Now, behave.
I
was looking for a photo to share for Throwback Thursday when I came across this
one—a shot of me sitting in a major market TV newsroom in 1988. I won’t embarrass the station by saying in
this post which newsroom it was (although I am posting it in the station’s forum
on Facebook—so they’ll know.) But it reminds me of how different things
were back then.
You
absolutely cannot tell the changes by way of the picture. What do you see? A confident, relatively young man smiling at
the camera. Yep, that’s me. I had just turned 30. I never thought of myself in those days as
being attractive, but I’d give my chances for eternal bliss—and yours too—to look
like that again. In the wider version from which this was cropped, you can see that I’m surrounded by a
couple of coworkers, and they were quite busy. I was, too, until just seconds before the
photo was taken, and then I got busy again, right away. In that regard, TV newsrooms haven’t changed
much. There’s always too much work for
too few people, and with today’s ever-shrinking news budgets that is even more
true now than it was then. (Note to “real
world” employers: this is why former TV
news staffers tend to make excellent workers.
They’re used to busting their butts to meet tight deadlines and deal
with shifting challenges that can, and do, change by the minute. Silly them, they think this level of
productivity is entirely normal for the American workplace).
Other
things have changed a great deal. I won’t go into a dissertation about journalism
resources and ethics and all that, as I’ve already done so copiously in other places.
Even more profound were some of the cultural changes, and those you
definitely cannot see in this photo.
When
I walked into my first TV newsroom in 1980, I was struck by how profane it
was. I’m not saying every third word was
a gd-bomb, s-bomb, f-bomb, or mf-bomb, but it sure seemed like it. Given that, to this day, my sense of humor
has never evolved beyond the sophomoric, I loved it. When I changed jobs four years later, I
wondered whether that new environment might have the same culture. It did.
Very cool. A good time was had by
all. Well, maybe not all. But we didn’t much think about that at the
time. We sure would later, though.
In
1987 I got a chance to go to the Big Leagues, a TV newsroom in a top-15
market. That is the television industry equivalent
of what professional baseball players would call “The Show.” On making this transition, it naturally
occurred to me that the professionals in such an environment might be more,
well, professional in their demeanor.
More staid. Less prone to obscene outbursts. Less accepting of such behavior. I worried that I and my by-now totally
corrupted potty mouth might not fit in.
I
walked into that big-market newsroom in November of that year and stood in the
very spot from which the photo was taken, with the thoughts I just outlined
flowing through my mind. I had only just
arrived when someone shouted out with an angry exclamation. The voice came from a tiny little desk in the far left corner of the newsroom that I could not even see from where I was standing because it was hidden behind a partition. But this barrier in no way muffled the
clarity of the speakers’ voice. At the top of her lungs, she vented her annoyance
over some on-the-job frustration, setback or obstacle, with the words, “F*&% ME!!!!!!”
Did
I mention that I’d been standing in that newsroom as a new employee for only
about a minute at the time?
Mentally
I did a fist-pump and thought, “Yes! I’m home!”
And
that’s the way it was, for a short while longer. We cussed.
We told dirty jokes. We said things out loud that make me blush
now just to think of it. No one
objected. The women seemed to enjoy it as much as if not more than the men did. They certainly did
their fair share of participating.
Of
course, some did not
enjoy it but chose to suffer in silence and say nothing. We finally heard from the quiet contingent in
1991. That’s when Anita Hill testified
before Congress on live TV about what Clarence Thomas had said regarding the
unwanted item lying atop his Coke can.
(For those of you who were not around at the time and don’t know what I’m
talking about, I urge you to look it up; it’ll be good for your soul. Here—I’ll make it easy for you. Follow this link). You can get hauled before Congress for saying
that?
Really? Oh. My. God.
And
thus the party ended.
Fast
forward 25 years. Now we live in a
nation of finger-wagging scolds. Your
behavior is under scrutiny at all times, in practically all places, by societal
forces just dying to call you out and make an example of you. The 21st century has brought us a world of
technological advancement where all of us are monitored even more closely than
George Orwell imagined in his classic novel, 1984. Cell phones, with
photo and video capability, are everywhere.
Security cameras are in just about
every public space. Many employees are
subjected to audio, video, and email surveillance in the workplace; as the National Workrights Institute puts it, “The battle for workplace privacy is over; privacy
lost.”
You
might think that you at least have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you
are in your own house, but some have found the hard way that even that’s not
true. All it takes is one “friend” with
a cell phone surreptitiously recording you doing or saying something that might
offend public sensibilities, and you’re done, no matter who you are, or think you are. And while they’re running you the hell off,
no one holding those pitchforks and torches will shed a tear about your invaded privacy.
When
in public, you must now assume that you are on camera and are only one button
click away from being on the Internet at all times. Does your apartment or office building have
an elevator? Wave and say “hi.” And behind every one of those cameras is a
low-paid security employee just itching to find something worthy of posting to
the Twitterverse. When that happens,
you may well find reporters from coast to coast demanding your job for
something as egregiously offensive to the public mind as, say, jerking a dog on a leash. It doesn’t even
matter whether your behavior rises to the level of meriting some kind of
criminal charge. But it definitely does matter whether video or audio is
involved; in such cases, the good old fashioned “gotcha” rules of lurid
sensationalism that we all learned from tabloid TV years ago apply in a way guaranteed
to make you watch or click on an item that wouldn’t even have made the news at
all otherwise. This issue is so prevalent
that I’ve become convinced the Internet now exists for two purposes, and two
purposes alone: cat videos and public shamings.
Has
the dramatic reversal in behavioral expectations, and the attendant intrusion
into our lives by government and by our peers, made us a better society? Or a worse one? I leave that judgment to you.
But
I think we can all agree, it sure is different.
###
In my novel Messages, I write in detail about how TV newsrooms used to be—and how the seeds
were sown then to make them what they are today.
I invite you to check it out (read reviews and reader comments, download
a free sample chapter, and see purchase links for the print and Kindle versions here.)
If you enjoyed this, please share
with your friends. And I invite you to subscribe to this blog.
©2015 by Forrest Carr. All rights reserved.
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