Does a tight t-shirt add news credibility?

In which your online scribe reflects on why he didn't become a broadcast journalist

About the time that I started thinking about closing the doors at GetReligion.org after 20 years — this was almost two years ago — my adult children began making the case for me to create Rational Sheep.

The Big Idea: They argued that there was no way that I would stop reading about mass-media trends — especially entertainment and news in the digital age. Why not start a Substack that linked these concerns to themes from my Denver Seminary classes long ago (click for must-read essay) that focused on faith, family and apologetics?

They also urged me to have fun, every now and then.

Fun? That’s often hard to manage. I haven’t done the “fun” thing very often, in part because of the tsunami of serious public debates about screens culture and mental-health issues, especially among kids who live with smartphones in their hands. My many posts on those topics have been absolutely necessary, but not fun.

Thus, please allow me to share a few “fun” thoughts on television-news anchors wearing tight shirts and windbreakers. By the end of this quick post, there will be a dose of fun. I promise.

Start here: Five decades ago I briefly studied broadcasting at Baylor University, along with print journalism. I quickly dropped the broadcast classes and double-majored in journalism and American history.

Why broadcasting? Well, I was told that I had a good voice for radio. Television? I already had a face for radio, as well.

Besides, every time I turned on a television set I found myself mystified, if not amused, by many of the patterns and puzzles I saw in local and national news broadcasts. I have many of the same concerns today — or updated variations on the same themes — as we hit the end of the cable-TV and major-network news era.

We will get to the buff anchors in tight t-shirts shortly. Let me describe a few other TV-news realities that made (or still make) me uncomfortable.

* Why do television-news personalities — especially local anchors and sports journalists — laugh so much at jokes that aren’t funny? I asked a professor, long ago, if there were classes in which on-screen folks were taught the acting skills required to do that. I was told that this was something that pros gradually learn to do.

* Why all of the live outdoor shots during hurricanes and blizzards or, even stranger, reports featuring journalists standing in front of buildings in which events took place hours later? I was told: If you paid for vans, helicopters and satellite dishes, then you had to put the goods onscreen — even when it didn’t help content. Today, the digital age has made remote work even easier (and, yes, cheaper). My question: Is this improving writing and the quality of the reporting?

I understand that, every now and then, on-site reporting yields valid context. For example: A former Washington, D.C., student of mine took a cable-news job way up in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It was a one-man bureau. He once sent me a tape of footage from the edge of town in which he was operating his own camera on a tripod, which meant he could not see behind him. A polar bear wandered through the shot without him knowing it. Now, that’s context.