What I Learned During My Week At Black Entertainment Television

Pretty  much everyone knows that television news is terrible.

It is unwatchable.

It is crap.

The people who know this the best are the people who are actually in the business.

They aren’t kidding anyone, least of all themselves.

So when I went to start with BET’s news division it was with a certain measure of resignation. Another ‘news division’.

I had seen their stuff on their air briefly. Nothing to write home about.

Television news is terrible – I would go so far as to say unwatchable – because it is all made the same cookie-cutter way.

All the pieces basically look the same.  ABC, NBC, CNN, CBS, BBC, BET…. All the same.

And the formula hasn’t changed since 1972 or so.

Swap out a piece from ABC to CBC and you can’t tell the difference.

After 50 years of this, it has gotten beyond old.

Some networks do better for ‘production values’ than others, but it’s all pretty much the same crap.

Is there a solution to this? Is there a way to make news compelling?

It’s the Holy Grail of the broadcast news business.

Instead of cutting costs left and right, re-invent the medium to make it actually something you WANT to watch.

Now, we come to my week at BET.

In the beginning they were just another ‘news organization’ working in the same old way.

What makes print so compelling is that there is a sense of authorship.

Everyone speaks in their own voice.

In a strange way, what makes Fox News so highly rated is not their Right Wing philosophy, I think, but rather that they have an opinion. They have voices. They speak in their own voices.

The firing of Juan Williams from NPR seems to indicate that NPR is no so interested in disparate voices.

At the BET bootcamp we encourage – we force – the participants to find their own voices. To speak in their own voices.

Once they started to do that, the results were pretty impressive.

The pieces started to become not only watchable, but even compelling.

And it’s just the beginning.

If….

If they can keep at it.

If they aren’t squashed back into the ‘news’ mold.

If they could keep focus on nurturing authorship, I think they are positioned to create a break-out program.

A kind of hip, edgy, intelligent, 60 Minutes for the present and the future.

But it will take courage.

Courage on the part of BET to trust their staff.

And courage on the part of the participants to speak in their own voices.