The New York Observer's Rebecca Dana writes on the networks' pathetic and athletic attempts to clone FNC's morning show Fox & Friends:
CBS’s Early Show exec Steve Friedman's plan for moving the distant-third Early Show up in the ratings features copious banter—or, as he calls it, improving the program’s “talkability quotient.” He said he has a series of stunts planned for June, including one where the anchors switch jobs with their spouses and as-yet-unscripted hilarity ensues. (Incidentally, one of those anchors, Julie Chen, happens to be the spouse of Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS. Mr. Friedman said that Mr. Moonves hasn’t committed to the switcheroo, but one imagines the former actor to be quite adept at chitchat.)
Mr. Friedman is of the school that believes in partially planned banter.
“What you try to do is, you try to be loose enough that if they feel they need to do it, they can—but tight enough that you don’t depend on it to fill the time,” he said. “You never want to be in the position of saying, ‘O.K., at 7:51, we’re gonna have two minutes of banter.’”
Which is what they do, to ample if second-place ratings, at ABC’s Good Morning America. That show’s producers regularly schedule in time for a “water-cooler chat,” which is another way of saying “talkability quotient,” which is another way of saying “several minutes of viewer-engaging banalities.”
On the opposite end of the banter-theorizing spectrum, 180 degrees away from Mr. Bell at NBC, is the vast world of cable news. Equipped with the same dozen or so headlines but a luxurious 24 hours over which to read, analyze, reformulate and contextualize them, cable news has revolutionized the art of banter for the 21st century. Perhaps nowhere is this more in evidence than on Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox and Friends, which is about 98 percent banter to 2 percent news.
“It may look to the viewer as if it’s totally off the cuff and we’re just yakking about whatever comes to mind,” said David Clark, the show’s executive producer. “That is far from the case.”
Mr. Clark’s staff and anchors spend hours each morning poring over the day’s stories and working up “talking points” for the top and bottom of every hour. The whole process is highly intellectualized and extremely labor-intensive. “The point is to make it look easy,” he said. “You don’t want to make it look as if you’ve got everything down to the last detail.” Even if you do.
Mr. Clark said that he’s watched the networks try to ape this viewer-ingratiating tactic, expanding the time they spend on banter and reducing the time devoted to serious news. Indeed, banter is often what critics cite when they accuse television news—both cable and broadcast—for polluting substance with fluff. What do the medium’s most accomplished practitioners have to say about that?
“TV news has gone where the audience is,” said Joe Kernen, a former Wall Street broker and another anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box. “You can see what’s happened to mainstream news, even nightly news. Theatrics have seeped into all news. That’s where ratings are. This is not the Red Cross. We’re in a business here.
