Local news: the biggest scandal on TV.

Turn on the television set at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. in any part of America, or do the same at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock, and you are likely to encounter one of the oddest, if not most pernicious, phenomenons on television: the local newscast. What makes these programs so strange is that they are so eerily alike from Maine to Mississippi, no matter the network affiliation. There are always the breathless promos ("Nude man found at mall: Film at 11!"). There are always the two amiable chatting anchors, usually a middle-aged man and a somewhat younger woman. There are the younger roving reporters, featured five at various points around the community or nation, where they chat up the anchors. ("Do you know why the man was wearing no clothes, Jim?" "We're working on that, Susan.") There's the joking weatherman, the jock sportscaster, and more recently, the health editor and the lifestyle reporter. In a nation of enormous diversity, there's something both comforting and appalling in knowing that no matter where you are, the local news -- like the local McDonalds -- is always the same.

What makes most of these newscasts pernicious is that they are at the same time so influential and so awful -- at least in journalistic terms. In recent years, the local newscast has replaced the network evening news and the newspaper alike as the average American's main source of news: A study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 1996 found that 65 percent of all adults said they regularly watched the local TV news; only 42 percent reported that they did the same with a network newscast. In about two-thirds of all markets, according to another study, the early-evening local news shows attracted better raw than the network newscasts that followed them-and the local news is on for a longer time. Though k" newscasts have been studied far less systematically than the national news, nearly everyone who has examined their content has come away with the same conclusion. For example:

* A 1995 study of the local news in 50 major markets by the Rocky Mountain Media Watch found that crime and disaster news make up about 53 percent of the news on local newscasts -- the grislier the crime, the better. ("Soon shoots mother five times with bow and arrow.") Fluff -- defined by the study as `soft news, anchor chatter, teases, and celebrity items" -- takes up about 31 percent of the whole newscast, on average (items such as "Girl reunited with dog" or "How to tango").

* An informal 1993 survey the Washington Post of local newscasts on stations in five big cities found the percentage of stories involving crime , sex, disaster, accidents, or public fears running at anywhere from 46 to 74. In its survey, the Post found local newscast obsessed with murders, serial killers, snakebites, spider bites, tornadoes, mudslides, explosions, and satanic activity.

* A 1990 study published by the Columbia Journalism Review found that 18 of the 32 stories analyzed on local newscasts were inaccurate or misleading, and the station usually made no attempt to correct the mistakes. A report published the same year in the L.A. Reader, following examination of a week's worth of stories in that market, found stations routinely airing PR footage provided by companies with no acknowledgment that this was what was going on.

* In a 1991 book examining the local news, Making Local News, Phyllis Kaniss found, among other things, that local TV news reporters are more likely to accept their sources' viewpoints than are print reporters.

* A Chicago reporter looking at "sweeps week" on Los Angeles television found heavily promoted news stories on lesbian nuns, Geraldo Rivera's love life, and sex after 60.

As a critic once put it: The worst scandal the local news could ever uncover is itself.

Local news didn't start out this way. Until about 1970, local news -- with its mix of local stories, weather, and sports delivered in a low-key broadcast -- was an insignificant part of the television day. In the late '60s and early '70s, however, stations began to recognize the economic values of these newscasts. A news program is often less expensive than a dramatic show to produce, and, unlike national programming, the local station can retain the profits. Once they commenced in earnest, these newscasts began generating about one-third to half of the profits of local stations. Thus, in many markets, the local newscast started to expand -- to a half-hour before the evening network news, then an hour, and in many markets to 90 minutes in the early evening and several other times throughout the day.

National network news had grown from radio, along with a concomitant duty recognized by the networks to deliver information responsibly to their viewers. Run by journalists it was assumed these broadcasts would be loss leaders. By contrast, the local news arose because there was money to be made; the notion of what could possibly fill these hours came later, and in many cases the shows were run by television people with no use for traditional, pavement-pounding journalism.

Like the tabloid press at the turn of the century -- faced with a similar dilemma about how to bring a larger audience to news -- the locals frequently turned to such sensationalistic topics as crime. They also turned to the same small group of media consultants, who in turn tended to give them the same instructions whether they were in Laredo or Los Angeles. That explains the subsequent uniformity. In fact, anyone watching prime-time television knew how the medium worked in the '70s, and could have guessed the advice: Crime shows like Kojak attract the largest audience. Viewers respond to likable characters. All sitcoms revolve around families. It was the "genius" of these marketers to take the principles of prime-time fictional television and bring them to every local newscast in the nation, where they still remain in force. As one consultant's report put it:

It is not surprising...that research indicates ratings rise when the

broadcast is successful in exposing the listener to what he wants

to hear, in the very personal way he wants to hear it. In terms

of news, this means ratings are improved not when listeners are

told what they should know, but what they want to hear.

In other words, news would become a form of entertainment.

The whole style had begun, of all places, on public television in the late 1960s, when KQED in San Francisco had experimented with a daily newscast for nine weeks during a local newspaper strike. For this newscast the reporters gathered at a long table, where they discussed the stories they presented in depth with an anchor. The first commercial station to adopt the practice -- beginning with the local San Francisco ABC affiliate -- borrowed KQED's style, not its substance. Thus "happy talk" became an early feature of the local newscast, not to highlight the news but rather the newscasters.

According to Ron Powers, who chronicled the rise of local news in his book The Newscasters, this style then became the signature of many ABC-owned stations around the country, and others soon followed. One station had a typical ad campaign which went: "So good news or bad, laugh a little with your News-4 favorites: "You'll feel better." The industry trotted forth the usual analysts to explain its decision. "Audiences," said one, "have diametrically opposed needs: The desire to know, and a tremendous fear of finding out what happened. The communicator has to be someone they like if he is to put the whole frightening world together for them." By 1971, Time was already complaining. "What counts is not how the banana men relate the news," it wrote, "but how they relate to each other."

The main competitor to happy news on the local newscircuit was the closely related concept of "action news," dubbed in many places "Eyewitness News." Also developed by consulting firms, its signature was a high story count, an increasing number of striking visuals, and exciting upbeat music. Typical consultant recommendations called for "simplifying and limiting treatment of complex news, and elimination of `upperclass English." Key to all this was the presence of a personable male anchor -- although if things went wrong in the ratings, he was usually the guy blamed. That may explain why New York's WNBC in its formative period for local news went through a half-dozen or so anchormen -- including Jim Hartz, Gabe Pressman, John Palmer, and Frank McGee -- in a search for the holy ratings grail. It wasn't long, of course, before the two styles merged, so that virtually every station was using "happy talk" along with the impressionistic, tabloid approach of "action news." "You must have action in the first 12 seconds," Don Hewitt, the producer of 60 Minutes, would say one day. "It doesn't matter what the action is."

Over the years, these approaches have continued to dominate the style of local TV news, though improvements in technology have affected the mix. The use of satellites allowed stations to send more reporters "live" into the field, with the result that most newscasts eventually featured the daily obligatory story or two of reporters wandering around the crime scene with little to report but their own presence.

By the 1980s, the technology had also improved enough that many local stations could send reporters to both national and international events, to report back live. They usually managed to do that even before the network news had come on the air. In the past, the networks had restricted to their own national shows both the national and international footage they obtained -- if not to preserve the quality of the reporting, then to maintain their exclusive franchise and keep ratings high. At the same time that local stations began traveling around, however, CNN broke the networks monopoly on world and national footage by offering such feeds to the locals.

The result was that local stations began to become the average viewer's window on the whole world, rather than just the local area. The same sketchy, tabloid coverage that had characterized local events now became the trademark of national and international coverage. "Can you imagine how the civil-rights movement would have been affected if only local stations handled it?" former CBS News President Richard Salant once asked a reporter. Actually, the question might have been if they had covered it at all, since local stations always seemed to prefer stones like plane crashes or hurricanes, which allowed them to fly their reporters somewhere, put them on a beach in rain gear, and encourage them to babble and act fearful.

Ironically, national feeds of all sorts became so easy for local stations to pick up that they stopped doing some of the harder work of local reporting. "Why have a reporter hang around City Hall when he or she can sit in your tape room in Des Moines or wherever, monitor an incoming feed on, say, Michael Jackson leaving a New York hospital, and then report `live from the newsroom' on the story?" a former network news executive questioningly complained to former New York Times editor and current magazine columnist Max Frankel.

A similar inclination to laziness and self-promotion increasingly led the locals to use "news stories" to promote entertainment shows on their own network. "Meet The Beast at 9, then meet the man who created it at 11!" screamed one NBC promo in New York in the '90s (The Beast was a made-for-TV movie.) In Washington, D.C., it was "The author of The Beast tells you what to fear right here in D.C.!" "You saw Law and Order," asked another, "but can it really happen?"

The effect of all this was to change the content of the national network newscasts themselves -- which saw their rating beginning to tumble as they faced this local threat. "After you have watched an hour of local news," Tom Bettag, an executive producer of the CBS Evening News asked in 1990, "why would you watch another half-hour of network?" So national anchors like Dan Rather hit the road, and the networks began becoming more tabloid themselves an attempt to win back the audience they had lost to the locals.

By the '90s, the tail was wagging the dog: Now, local news was setting the journalistic standard for the networks. The result was that tabloid-like stories about Michael Jackson or Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan also became the province of national newscasts -- as did the perennial local obsession with crime. Even excluding the O.J. Simpson case, the three network newscasts spent four times as many hours covering murder cases in 1994 as they had only four years earlier. In 1995, the three network newscasts broadcast 2,574 crime stories -- nearly one out of every five stories run. That was four times the number of crime stories they had run as late as 1991, even though crime had actually declined in this later period.

With local stations providing an alternative to national broadcasts, newsmakers also had the option of going to them to make their case. During his presidency, George Bush often used local media to get his message across, knowing that local anchors -- awed by the presidency and their own lack of national experience -- would ask less-threatening questions than the network reporters. The practice continued in earnest throughout the 1992 campaign, when Bill Clinton did the same thing -- beginning in the New Hampshire primary, as he circumvented national reporters who seemed to want to talk only about Gennifer Flowers.

On the one hand, these local stations do provide a venue for national figures to talk about issues when the national press tends to get bogged down talking about "insider" strategy rather than substance. On the other hand, such reports often provide virtually no critical analysis; many congressmen have been known to get their canned "news feeds" directly on the air, particularly in smaller markets. Communication it is, but journalism it isn't.

Improved technology also gave greater prominence on the local newscast to the weather -- for very practical reasons often the heart of the show. Weather is only a small part of newspaper journalism, but it has been an integral part of local TV news since its inception in the 1950s. After all, the introduction of weather news permitted another commercial between segments-and, with news in those primitive days consisting entirely a sober anchor reading a script at a desk, it allowed local news shows to introduce their first non-hard-news personalities. Joining the early ranks were New York's Tex Antoine with Uncle Weatherbee and Washington's Willard Scott, who occasionally would dress up as Robin Hood, George Washington, or whomever, and once said, "A trained gorilla could do what I do" In the 1950s some stations even turned to attractive "weather girls," one of whom once said, "The temperature in New York is 46 -- and me, I'm 36-26-36"

With the development of weather satellites in the '70s and '80s, however, the visuals improved greatly -- allowing viewers to observe the process of weather formation in ways they couldn't before. In fact, with the hiring of meteorologists as weather forecasters, weather reporting became so good on TV that once the cable industry was up and running, one of its more successful stations proved to be the Weather Channel. In late summer, Americans would begin tracking every tropical storm, hour by hour, and in the winter they did the same with snow. "The news media, particularly if there arc no other big events, tend to over-hype the storms compared to what storms actually do," Bill Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University once told a reporter. "You have a lot of these beautiful satellite pictures that create a lot of interest. And people have a natural interest in damage and other people's problems. It makes your own problems seem a little less."

Yet on the local news, weather would always take a back seat to crime. And studies showed that an overload of crime news tends to make viewers ever more fearful, and increasingly likely to support ever more radical measures designed to curb disorder. "What I object to is the lack of context," a local cable news reporter once said. "It all goes hurtling by, and the world is a frightening and inexplicable place."

Moreover, what gets ignored gets forgotten. "[C]overage of the environment, education, the economy, science, the arts, children, civil rights, parenting, conflict resolution, and homelessness didn't make the news today on most stations," stated the aforementioned Rocky Mountain Media Watch study, reporting on the results of its survey of a day in the life of local news. "And if it's not in the news, it's not on our public agenda"

In his book The Newcasters, Ron Powers suggested 20 years ago that local TV news had an obligation to sacrifice some of its profits to give its community better-informed newscasts. Yet, better-informed citizens now know to avoid local TV news for much of anything but weather and sports. In an atomized market, where wealthier viewers can turn to computers or cable (including around-the-clock local cable news in many areas), local TV news is increasingly left with a downscale audience which doesn't think that "journalism" as practiced in the National Enquirer or the tabloids is all that terrible. The producers of these newscasts are right when they proclaim that local TV news gives viewers what they want. It just doesn't give them what they need.

For a look at just how low local news can go, check out the recent uproar in Chicago, where WMAQ recently decided to hire trash talk show host Jerry Springer as a commentator on its evening news.

The April 23 announcement earned the station a torrent of negative publicity, with the public and the press alike decrying the sad state of TV news. WMAQ anchorwoman Carol Marin's decision to resign over Springer's hiring (saying it indicated the station's news standards had deteriorated) won her glowing press coverage and a farewell ovation from co-workers at the close of her final broadcast.

True to form, Springer's opening commentary was a histrionic denouncement of Marin that included name-calling ("Walter Cronkite wannabe"), accusations of "elitist snobbery," and references to Nazis and the Holocaust.

The good news? Following Springer's debut, WMAQ's ratings fell, viewers picketed the building, and the station was swamped with protest calls. (Sources told the New York Daily News that, by early afternoon on the day after Springer's first show, the station had logged more than 3,700 critical calls.) Less than a week later, the controversial talk show host quit, saying the situation had gotten "too personal."

Perhaps the public has a little more sense than program directors give them credit for.