Great piece--more of an exposé, really--on the news Emmys
in the 7/24 New York Observer. Writer Rebecca Dana points out that the Emmys are really just $350 "Scammies":
On July 18, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the 27th annual News and Documentary Emmys—150 production teams, some consisting of more than 30 people. This year, the awards are more exclusive than ever: Under its new one-statue policy, the academy will provide the winning team in each category with only one trophy.
Unless, that is, the team chooses to buy more.
Call ’em the Scammies!
The most coveted prize in TV news is, in fact, easy to come by. It just takes cash. For $350 a pop, any member of the winning news teams can pick up a supplemental trophy. Given the size of the nominated crews, that can mean a dozen or more statues in each of the 29 Emmy categories. Everybody gets a prize—and the academy gets thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars....
...Emmy-glomming is a longstanding industry tradition. TV is a collaborative process, and it is rarely perfectly clear who worked on a particular story long enough or hard enough to merit a spot on the application. Sometimes considerable politicking goes into the preparation of the entry forms, each of which requires extensive paperwork, a two-page essay and a $300 fee.
“At a show like Dateline, for example, they have to decide which of 500 segments they’re going to enter in a given year,” said Paul Sparrow, an Emmy-winning producer and an executive at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. “A lot of that is political. Which producer is in favor right now? Which correspondent on the upswing? I know that there are times when the producers have to pay for the entries themselves because the networks chose to nominate someone else...”
In other words, the news Emmys are an utter, highly politicized joke...and it puts the fact that CNN got six nominations this year and Fox News Channel zero in stark perspective.
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