‘You Don’t Understand Our Audience’
Dec 31st, 2007 at 10:04 pm by Susie
This is a very long, very thoughtful piece written by former NPR and NBC “Dateline” reporter John Hockenberry about life on the inside:
Finding such comparisons was how I kept from slipping into a coma during dozens of NBC employee training sessions where we were told not to march in political demonstrations of any kind, not to take gifts from anyone, and not to give gifts to anyone. At mandatory, hours-long “ethics training” meetings we would watch in-house videos that brought all the drama and depth of a driver’s-education film to stories of smiling, swaggering employees (bad) who bought cases of wine for business associates on their expense accounts, while the thoughtful, cautious employees (good) never picked up a check, but volunteered to stay at the Red Roof Inn in pursuit of “shareholder value.”
To me, the term “shareholder value” sounded like Mao’s “right path,” although this was not something I shared at the employee reëducation meetings. As funny as it seemed to me, the idea that GE was a multinational corporate front for Maoism was not a very widespread or popular view around NBC. It was best if any theory that didn’t come straight from the NBC employee manual (a Talmudic tome that largely contained rules for using the GE credit card, most of which boiled down to “Don’t”) remained private.
I did, however, point out to the corporate-integrity people unhelpful details about how NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor. I wondered aloud, in the presence of an integrity “team leader,” how we were to reconcile this larger-scale conflict with the admonitions about free dinners. “You make an interesting point I had not thought of before,” he told me. “But I don’t know how GE being a defense contractor is really relevant to the way we do our jobs here at NBC news.” Integrity, I guess, doesn’t scale.
Ha ha ha. That first paragraph sounds a lot like my Stars & Stripes training.
Life on the inside, indeed.
When I was editing at Army Times, the whole newsroom was summoned to the Gannett Death Star in Maclean, Va., for an Ethiks (TM) seminar. It amounted to a briefing on how to avoid lawsuits. Nobody mentioned the AT&T advertisements running right next to the pictures of dead American service men and women. “So you’ve heard you’ll be relocating? Call AT&T!” No joke. Check the back issues.
Sorry, I meant “McLean, Va.”
(You know, sorta like that simulated meat sandwich from McDicks.)
Wouldn’t want to misplace the Blue Ball Express…
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2435
John Hockenberry wrote a really wonderful autobiography a few years back that I highly recommend. There is a particularly hilarious story he tells of going into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment (a wheelchair stalker), she comes home, he hides his wheelchair and himself under the bed and is forced to listen to her have sex on the bed above him. You got to love a guy that rats himself out like that.