I'M SUPPOSED TO BE INTERESTED.I have been visually stunned and awed by a group of very important, very select, very dedicated and uber-talented, hard-nosed, take-no-prisoner, reporters who are way above the rest of the mere morsels.
They dig deep. They rock the boat. They siege, they attack, they prey upon the powerful and almighty --at least in theory but kick me, I have yet to see thus far and its been a long time.
NBC Bay Area (KNTV) has a team called The "Investigative Unit" or "We Investigate", something like that, I'm not a hundred percent certain but anyway they are supposed to be really good investigate reporters and expose quite a bit but if you know anything big, someone really evil they've exposed, call me because I've yet to see anything of note and please don't inundate my mail with small stuff.
This whole "We Investigate" is not only a San Jose/NBC phenomenon --its a franchise with almost all the NBC O and O's and its chock full of GLOBS of money, somewhere in the high seven figures its budget is and that's for each station. KNTV in San Jose has a "unit" (supposed to sound impressive) and you, the viewer, are supposed to be blown away by its investigative prowess.
To give you a little perspective, over at KGO, relentless, vigorous, Dan Noyes has one producer; less than a quarter of NBC's "WeInvestigate" budget and breaks far more stories. "ITeam" isn't anywhere as slick or sexy as We Investigate but it's far more successful. And relevant too.
Call me old-fashioned but I'm more of a substance over style guy.
I like Investigation Team on NBC 11 better except I don't watch NBC 11 news focusing South Bay and reporters I dislike.
ReplyDeleteWill they look into our Democrat leaders in the Bay Area please? And no sweeping the facts under the rug.
ReplyDeleteThey can do what Ronan Farrow(Sinatra) did with the Weinstein story when NBC killed it, go to the New Yorker.
DeleteThe media is afraid of Willie Brown just like everyone's afraid of the Clintons.
DeleteI'm a Michael Finney guy myself.
ReplyDeleteThe investigation that would be worthwhile would involve CEQA and the way it is used by above mentioned Democratic leaders and labor unions under the guise of environmental protection to hold developers hostage. Unfortunate side effect? Your rent is too high or you have nowhere to live at all because we can't get enough housing units approved. If people understood the way that votes are bought by the labor complex and how it impacts their every day lives (i.e. pocketbook) it would be quite an investigation indeed.
ReplyDeleteWhen you call the 'We Investigate' unit...your call goes to a NBC call center in Texas.
ReplyDeleteTexas is the clearing house for all the NBC Investigates units.
The Investigative Unit is quickly becoming the Bay Area's go-to brand for obtaining justice.
ReplyDeleteThey should investigate KFC. Being a single guy I have eaten at many KFC chicken eateries. Not once have I ever seen any type of vehicle delivering chickens to any of these places! How do they get their chickens? Is it really chicken?
ReplyDeleteGreat observation-while they're at it, they should investigate all of the Wendy's, Jack In The Box's, In N Outs and Nation's to see how they get all of those cows into "these places"! Is it really beef or some other animal protein?
DeleteInvestigative reporting might be more effective with less self-importance in the promos. Noyes has always come across as being very full of himself, and perhaps bitter that he was born too late to have been a member of the vintage '60 Minutes' team and learning the tricks of the trade from Mike Wallace himself.
ReplyDeleteAs for 'We Investigate', like many, I don't watch KNTV, and so my only exposure to their team was the promos that ran incessantly where someone used the tired expression, 'We speak truth to power'...while making it sound like they covered weightier topics than who was double parked outside the Watsonville City Hall the night they had that meeting about installing another traffic light.
Nobody beats Stanley Roberts!
ReplyDeleteStanley Roberts picks on ordinary hard-working people who make a mistake which he then manufactures into a federal case. He's more like a predator.
DeleteAs a former long-time TV news photog...I'll admit now: I absolutely HATED working on I-Team/Investigative pieces. To me, they were pretty boring to shoot and/or edit as a videographer or editor...There was zero creativity from a camera point-of-view: PKG's featuring talking heads or ambush interviews....covered with file video, still pics, graphics, full-screen fonts...and lots of fancy edit-transitions.
ReplyDeleteWHile these pieces absolutely have important info...or can "make a difference"...they were just plain boring to shoot & edit.
After awhile, they all start to look/sound/feel the same.
PREACH, 8:07!!!
DeleteI too was a photog...and hell yeah those pieces are boring as shit from a photog/editor point of view. I could only take so many of those "dramatic" slam-the-stack-of-documents" visual & sound effect.
Besides...why differentiate an "Investigative" piece from the rest of the newscast? If it's that good, why don't you lead the damn show with an I-Team piece? Investigative--isn't that what "journalism" is supposed to be about?
By burying it in the B-block, it signals that the piece isn't that important--otherwise, it would be THE top story of the day, right???
Flashy promos but not much else. The days of "freeze" your on camera gotcha journalism long gone. The primary reason why ratings suck.
ReplyDelete