Sunday, March 24, 2019
When CBS' '60 Minutes' Examined KGO's News --'If It Bleeds It Leads'; Birth Place of 'Happy Talk'
The above video is from 1974; in it, Mike Wallace from '60 Minutes', has some interesting takes on KGO's TV News dominance in the 70's; a dominance based on the birthplace of 'Happy Talk' and KGO's infamous tagline: "If It Bleeds, It Leads'"
Wallace's quips with Russ Coughlin, the GM at KGO at the time and legendary Circle7 news anchor, Van Amburg are well worth watching.
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I lived in Philadelphia then and the ABC station there had the same style and gimmick. In fact, I believe that station, WPVI, invented the whole "Action News" format, and then the network had all the other O and Os copy it. WPVI also dominated in Philly while I lived here (one ND told me it had pretty much been decided that the only way anyone would pass 'PVI was if they somehow destroyed themselves) and is, I think, still number one.
ReplyDeleteWPVI Channel 6 is still No. 1 in Philadelphia, probably the longest winning streak in local TV news. The ownership situation mirrored San Francisco in one way. WPVI pushed from the top KYW 3, the Westinghouse-owned station at the time. Just like KGO pushed Westinghouse-owned KPIX from the top here in the early 70s. In both Philly and SF, Westinghouse used the "Eyewitness News" moniker. And in both cities starting in the mid-70s, their stations were constantly playing catch-up with the ABC stations when it came to local news. I remember the joke in Philly was that the slogan of KYW Channel 3 was "We're 3 -- as in third in the ratings." Like KPIX, KYW went through many anchors and format changes trying to top the competition, never having any success in the 70s, 80, 90s, 00s or today. In the mid-90s, Westinghouse bought CBS, and KPIX and KYW became CBS O&Os.
DeleteActually, the term I heard most often was the opposite:
ReplyDelete"If it bleeds, it leads". This refers to newspapers, TV and radio back in the 70's. I have never heard the reverse, but that may be a regional thing. I was back in Ohio then.
I always wondered what they meant when KGO said "There's more to life than news, weather and sports."
ReplyDeleteThat all seems so quaint now. It is odd though how both the Chronicle and KGO were the leading news orgs in that era in an area that kind still prides itself on its snobby leanings. You would figure with all the Cal and Stanford alums and business types, as well as the liberal leanings, this area would have at least had one news source on par with the LA Times or Boston Globe.
KRON thought itself that way for a couple of decades...
DeleteWhether it was in practice - not for me to judge.
Rich, thanks for posting this. I've been looking for this video for years without any luck. I remember watching it when I was 12. Tells you what kind of nerd I was watching "60 Minutes" at that age.
ReplyDeleteThe clip begins after "60 Minutes" played the classic KGO Cowboys promo, where the KGO anchors dress up like characters in a Western. (Fred) Van Amburg, of course, wears the white hat, which was part of his persona of being the crusader for the little guy. I've heard that the KGO Cowboys influenced the anchor team gang fight scene in Anchorman.
Mike Wallace got his stats about how much tabloid material was in the three stations' newscasts from a student research project at UC Berkeley. The students were commissioned by "60 Minutes" to record every local newscast for a week and break them down by the number of seconds they spent on various topics.
While Wallace focused on how much tabloid material was on these shows (fire, crime, sex, tear-jerkers, animal stories and the occult), the other trend he didn't go into was happy talk, which Van Amburg pioneered in San Francisco. Before happy talk, anchors never interacted with one another on the air. They were very much like robotic announcers reading from a script with no ad-libbing. I think happy talk humanized the anchors and made them more appealing to the public.
The discussion of the cut-off penis found by the railroad tracks cracked me up. But Van's comeback was good too -- that there was a victim out there, there was a murder spree going on, and "we didn't cut that thing off and put it out there." Mentioning a penis on TV in the early 70s was forbidden. Notice how they call it a "male sexual organ."
It'd be interesting to go back to the logs the UC-Berkeley students kept of the newscasts from 1974 and compared them to what the stations are putting out today. We'd probably see the same amount of fire, crime, sex and tear-jerkers. Nothing on the occult -- that fad has passed. And we wouldn't see much of the serious news that "60 Minutes" listed in that crawl during the story.
Van Amburg's journalistic crusader style wouldn't be allowed today either. The idea of an anchorman trying to right the wrongs of society would strike fear in the hearts of management because it would step on too many toes.
Imagine how Van Amburg would have handled the Jeff Adachi cocaine story or the Larry Baer domestic violence episode?
One more thing -- notice the stand-ups Wallace did outside the old station buildings. KPIX was at 2655 Van Ness back then. The building was torn down several years ago. KRON was further south at 1001 Van Ness. They didn't show the exterior of KGO, but that's when they were in the 200 block of Golden Gate Ave. near the edge of the Tenderloin neighborhood.
Good grief. After all these years, why does that story about the "discovery" on the railroad tracks still get so much mileage? I'm cracking up as I'm typing. Guess that's why.
DeleteGod, am I the only one who actually WAS here at that time? I was born here, it's absurd not many can say that. Anyway, it was a wonderful re-visit of the great Mike Wallace doing his 60 Minute opus work focusing on our little old neck of the woods taking a serious look at how news was being "bastardized" as noted in the video by Mr Al Constant, president of KRON. Has it gotten worse or is local news better now than in '74? Would news directors now go on 60 Minutes and be open to questions about their news content? KPIX's Jim Van Nessle brought the great Wayne Walker with him from Detroit, a move lasting over 20 years. A great document of the past and a not far off portent of the ideas Paddy Chayefsky wrote of in Network.
ReplyDeleteDidn't know Van did the Michael Finney kind of stories himself. Great energy from him. And Russ is the central casting patrician manager, old time accent and all.
ReplyDeleteIf anything it was great to see some old faces.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this great story, Rich!
ReplyDeleteNow this is good stuff. Lots of names from the past. Most of the people reading this blog won't remember Gene Tuck and Andy Park from KPIX. They only know Van Amburg because he recently passed away. It was cool to see "Fast" Eddie Alexander at KRON4 too. Fred LaCosse is a huge improvement over what they have now. Good work here!
ReplyDeleteAndy Park . . . Red Beard . . . I saw he became a professional photographer. Is he still around?
DeleteA classic! Nice to see the old anchors and sets. I watched KGO news until the early 80s.
ReplyDeleteBefore Van Amburg went to TV he was a rado talk show host on KNEW
ReplyDeleteThe 1950s & 1960s belonged to John Weston at KPIX, with some of Jerry Jensen when the latter was at KRON between 1960 & 68 before he became Van Amburg's lieutenant anchor at KGO-TV in 1969. Most of the 1970s belonged to Amburg, though Dennis Richmond at KTVU and Dave McElhatton at KPIX both launched their runs in 1976-77. Starting around 1979, Richmond started to win a few weeks from Amburg. In the 1980s, Richmond and McElhatton each began to surpass Amburg more, especially after Jensen's health began to rapidly decline (as posted 10 days after the Warriors' first and only Oakland-based NBA title of their 4 Bay championships in 2017, when Amburg died and KGO-TV went from joyful to devastated in just a week and a half, Van was not the same when Jerry succumbed to cancer in the early 1980s). After Amburg left in 1986, it was Richmond, McElhatton, and Amburg's successor Pete Wilson battling for the top, with Richmond often winning. Then Wilson ended his first KGO-TV stint, and finally, KRON saw No. 1 every now and then by the late 1980s. It was Richmond v Wilson for most of the 1990s. McElhatton was succeeded by Ken Bastida in 2000, and KPIX, unfortunately despite Bastida's best efforts, have never sniffed No. 1. Wilson returned to KGO-TV in the early 2000s after KRON left NBC, and grabbed No. 1 for one handful of weeks up to 2007, when the terrible heart attack loss before a Friday Radio show happened. But Richmond through his retirement in 2008 kept KTVU on top, and his successor, Frank Somerville, despite recent in-studio and out-of-office troubles, continues that run, even though Dan Ashley consistently producing great newscasts for KGO-TV since succeeding Wilson in 2007.
ReplyDeleteAmburg's way of reporting definitely would have led to an ugly feud with a loud, insipid Trixie-type ND. But it always earned Amburg respect from Mike Wallace, who followed Amburg since Van was at KPIX in the mid-1960s and Wallace's CBS colleagues did national reports in SF.
Russ Coughlin - miss him, one of a kind, juggling TV front office duties with a late night Radio show at KGO (most of the time, the evening show that aired before Coughlin's was hosted by some guy named Owens). Knew what he was doing, yet was a great listener. We don't have that anymore by the Bay. A shame.
BTW, Tuck-Park forever a dud at PIX, despite Walker's best efforts. Stan Bochman did fine work, but left the Bay and in came Mac. As for LaCosse, no on air success at KRON but he fell in love with a colleague, and that other Fred & Terry Lowry have been blissed for over 40 years, rare in the broadcasting industry (both also worked at KGO).
Great insight within an often forgotten 60 Minutes story. Unbelievable how many of KGO-TV & KRON's staffers at the time were all at one time working at KPIX.
Thank you 9:39 for this great run down of history and timelines. I'd gotten sketchy on some of these. You must be well known yourself or on the front lines during that time. But we all get a lot out of the memories and takes of people who were on the scene and can re-open a light to those times. On a side note, didn't Van have just the greatest vocal presence ever!
DeleteIt's Jim Van Messel (not Nessle) who threw up on his shoes trying to answer Wallace's questions. He went on to produce tabloid dreck Entertainment Tonight and Abscess Hollywood.
ReplyDelete