Inside NBC's 'Dateline'

Remember John Hockenberry? He was a correspondent for NBC's "Dateline" until getting the ax a couple of years ago. Hockenberry got involved in the MIT Media Lab and is set to co-host a show on NY public radio station WNYC (he's a former NPR reporter). Anyway, his experiences at NBC are the basis for a lengthy and revealing examination of how the network's news operations worked. As you might guess, it's not flattering. "Dateline's" programming formula devolved into what he called "To Catch a Predator": Post offers of sex with minors on the Internet and see whether anybody responds. "’Dateline's’ notion of New Media was the technological equivalent of etching 'For a good time call Sally' on a men's room stall and waiting with cameras to see if anybody copied down the number," he writes in the January/February issue of MIT's Technology Review (via TV Newser).

This is a decidedly one-sided account from a less-than-disinterested party. But while noticeably self-serving – and maybe overreaching – some of his stories ring true, especially those involving NBC honcho Jeff Zucker. He writes that "something about Zucker's physical presence and bluster made him seem like a toy action figure from The Simpsons or The Sopranos." Several days after 9/11, Hockenberry happened to be in the office of "Dateline" executive producer David Corvo proposing a series of stories about al-Qaeda when Zucker walks in.

Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. "Maybe," said Zucker, "we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters." He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.

With that, Zucker rushed back to his own office, many floors above Dateline's humble altitude. My meeting with Corvo was basically over. He did ask me what I thought about Zucker's idea for a reality show about firefighters. I told him that we would have to figure a way around the fact that most of the time very little actually happens in firehouses. He nodded and muttered something about seeking a lot of "back stories" to maintain an emotional narrative. A few weeks later, a half-dozen producers were assigned to find firehouses and produce long-form documentaries about America's rediscovered heroes. Perhaps two of these programs ever aired; the whole project was shelved very soon after it started. Producers discovered that unlike September 11, most days featured no massive terrorist attacks that sent thousands of firefighters to their trucks and hundreds to tragic, heroic deaths.

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Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

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Sometimes entertainment actually drove selection of news stories. Since Dateline was the lead-in to the hit series Law & Order on Friday nights, it was understood that on Fridays we did crime. Sunday was a little looser but still a hard sell for news that wasn't obvious or close to the all-important emotional center. In 2003, I was told that a story on the emergence from prison of a former member of the Weather Underground, whose son had graduated from Yale University and won a Rhodes Scholarship, would not fly unless it dovetailed with a story line on a then-struggling, soon-to-be-cancelled, and now-forgotten Sunday-night drama called American Dreams, which was set in the 1960s. I was told that the Weather Underground story might be viable if American Dreams did an episode on "protesters or something." At the time, Dateline's priority was another series of specials about the late Princess Diana.