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"Broadcast Programming"
This is an important movie for the broadcasting industry for many
reasons. Fisrt of all, to my knowledge there never before was a movie
that dealt with the programming aspect of the broadcasting industry
before (except for Switching Channels, which was released at approximately
the same time). Also, this movie depicts many things common to the
broadcasting world in a way which the average moviegoing viewer can relate
to them, the same ones who watch the prime-time television news that this
movie centers about.
Moreover, Broadcast News shows the pressures and demands involved with
broadcasting. A great deal of work goes into the little subtleties in
television situations that before I watched this movie I had taken for
granted. One instance that sticks out in my head is when actress Holly
Hunter and the rest of the news staff in Washington raced to get a tape
into the machine which was to be broadcast nationally; the characters had
talked like it was such a big deal if it were a few seconds late. At
first, I didn't think that this was such a big deal; when an anchorman on
a television news program announces a special report and there is a four
or five second delay during which everything is blacked out, I noticed that
I became slightly irritated, but not much. But when you are dealing with a
national audience and battling between two other major networks for the
same people at the same time, I suppose that little things like this mean a
lot. Also, when Holly and her partner went on a special assignment to a
warfront, they risked their lives for a thirty second spot on the newscast.
It was incredible to realize that this happens every day, on three major
networks, all for advertising dollars. Even the small things like I
mentioned earlier apparently mean a whole lot to the networks; in the
movie Jack Nicholson laid off a slew of the Washington staff, "all because
they just couldn't program Wednesday nights."
Another thing that the movie did was to portray a bad image for anchor
people, writing most of them off as people who just have to look good and
not understand anything at all about what they are reporting about. This
is also related to the subject of favoritism, in which a job is given to
someone by who they know or what they look like rather than how they can
actually perform. This often leads to the wrong person getting the job,
and is common in any business industry (like in our resume worksheets in
which the woman, who was better qualified, did not get the job).
Lastly, this movie puts broadcasting in the spotlight - it exposes the
weaknesses of commerciality in a comical, almost satrical way. It shows
how programming is often unoriginal, and how bad choices are made by
programming executives in today's world in hopes of more money. But if any
of this is true, it is not just the programmer's fault - they need a job,
and the networks need to operate. Without advertising money, they cannot
do that. And advertisers won't pay to advertise on networks that people
don't watch. So maybe the movie is important because it shows the viewers
that we could be our own biggest enemies by demanding shallow, stale
television programming instead of fresh and different things. In doing
this, cleverly enough, the movie makes one big satire of itself.
Broadcast Programming
Professor Allen
Michael Stutz
1/16/9O