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November 08, 2005
Lines blurring between entertainment and news
By DAVID BAUDER
Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — An on-screen NBC News identifier for a fictional debate on “The West Wing” and a “news conference” by a fake Boston Red Sox executive on ESPN show how fuzzy the lines between news and entertainment have become.
An NBC News “bug” was kept on the screen Sunday night during the live debate between presidential candidates portrayed by Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits on “The West Wing.”
Meanwhile, ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” in an effort to juice up a segment on baseball gossip, had analyst Steve Phillips pose as Red Sox general manager answering questions about the team’s offseason priorities.
The news insignia was requested by “The West Wing” episode’s producer, former real-life Washington insider Lawrence O’Donnell, to help make the presidential debate seem more realistic. Jeff Zucker, the NBC Universal executive who has run NBC’s entertainment division and produced “Today” for NBC News, gave the OK.
NBC News programming like “Hardball” has been depicted on “The West Wing” in the past, news division spokeswoman Allison Gollust said.
Even with all the trappings — including real-life TV newsman Forrest Sawyer as the debate’s moderator — no one at NBC believed that viewers would mistake Alda’s Arnold Vinick or Smits’ Matt Santos for real-life politicians
Yet Jack Myers, a media business analyst, questioned whether NBC News diminished itself by allowing its name to be used in this way.
“Is this an appropriate use of the NBC News and MSNBC News brand equity, or does it do more damage to these news brands than the positive branding it brings to NBC’s entertainment series?” Myers asked on his Mediavillage.com Web site.
The MSNBC.com site went so far as to commission a poll with Zogby International, asking 1,208 viewers of “The West Wing” who won the debate. Fifty-four percent favored Santos, the Democratic candidate, which would have been more impressive if 59 percent of the viewers hadn’t favored him before the episode started.
By 2-to-1, Sunday’s viewers told Zogby that they preferred watching a fictional presidential debate to the real thing.
As a ratings sweeps month stunt, the live debate was a modest success: the audience of 9.6 million viewers beat the show’s season average of 8.2 million, according to Nielsen Media Research. The show was a distant third in the ratings to ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and CBS’ “Cold Case.”
Over on ESPN, fans who watched “SportsCenter” Sunday and Monday may have done a double-take: There was Phillips, a former New York Mets general manager, sitting behind a bank of microphones and before a background with the Red Sox insignia, answering questions from ESPN reporters.
Was he the replacement for Theo Epstein, who quit last week?
No, Phillips was just playing one on television.
A text “crawl” on the screen identified it as a “simulated Red Sox news conference.” Yet at a time news and sports networks constantly have a barrage of text information on their screens, it might not have immediately caught viewers’ eyes.
Vince Doria, ESPN’s news director, said it was done to enliven what is often a dull segment: analysts like Phillips sitting behind a desk and speculating about what teams will do.
“We were certainly aware that we needed to provide some kind of constant disclaimer,” Doria said. “I would hope that we haven’t gone too far. If we thought we had gone too far, we obviously wouldn’t have done it.”
Phillips will continue these fake news conferences for other teams, he said.
Next up: the New York Yankees, who, unlike the Red Sox, have a real general manager in place.
Posted by Jo at November 8, 2005 08:42 AM