How To Save TV News: Moneyball

The death of TV news is a self-serving prophecy told by those who don't know how to save it

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Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” rejecting. the advice of old pros in favor of new ideas from a guy he’s about to point to as part of a pretty good running gag. (Screengrab / Columbia Pictures.)

I’ve been trying to write this for years, hung up on having too much to say and fear that no one will believe TV news can be better.

We’ve collectively bought the self-serving lie of TV news execs that TV news can’t be both good and successful. That the only options are to be polarizing (and profitable) or boring (but honorable).

Then I realized baseball was considered a known quantity until Moneyball came along. So, y’know, hear me out.

Some people believe TV news can’t get better because it’s already the best that the best journalists can do. Some cynics think TV news sucks because it’s meant to serve the evil purposes of evil masters.

Before I became a TV news writer/producer, I was a reporter for a Brooklyn newspaper chain. I assumed that the TV news people making millions and speaking to millions were proportionately better than I was. Smarter than you and me. More knowledgeable.

I was wrong.

Conventional wisdom holds that viewers won’t watch TV news segments that illuminate policy and systemic issues. I was told in my first TV news job: Keep it simple, keep it short.

But the most successful TV news program in history is literally called 60 Minutes.

MS NOW’s top-rated segment for years has been the A block of The Rachel Maddow Show, the longest, most peripatetic segment every week on cable news.

So why do producers say not to do the things that successful programs do?

Because they don’t know how to do it. They’re right that it would fail … if they did it.

Our billionaire media overlords credulously believe the TV news wizards who claim it can’t be better only because TV news looks incredibly daunting from the outside.

In reality, any TV news outlet could decide tomorrow not to let Trump or Fox or the New York Times drive things, and start aping Fox’s strategy of not talking about what anyone else is (counter-programming).

I asked media analyst, author, and thinker Doug Rushkoff to reality-check my assessment of TV news’s woes:

“I myself have noticed the growing fatigue of young audiences with news stories arbitrarily cut down to supposedly digestible bites. M&Ms get boring if they’re all you’re served. …the most popular and watched news are long-form reports and monologues. It’s not the viewing audience that has a problem with in-depth, sense-making analysis—it’s the television journalists, who are producing media in a feedback loop with their own attention deficit and market paranoia.

“News is produced with the same depth of interrogation as a middle schooler’s AI prompt. The amount of effort required to pick up the phone, query a database, or maybe look up a law, should not flummox the professional journalist. As we get ready for the authoritarian crackdown on reporting (either through overt repression or floods of disinformation), we need at the very least to get out of our own way and begin making the news we’d like to make and see ourselves. We only grow audiences as good as the news we feed them.”

It’s not just 60 Minutes and Maddow that demonstrate the viability of better TV news.

When Chris Hayes and I created Up, his old weekend show, I was told not to make it a college lecture. Never mind that popular lectures are filled to capacity with the target demo.

Up had no-name guests and no fighting. When we did have name guests, we put them alongside not enemies but experts. Then-Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) sat next to Occupy the SEC’s Alexis Goldstein. Zionists shared the table with Palestinians.

We did extended discussions of atheism. And patent law. That last one alone is a fireable offense at most networks.

Our team broke TV news rules and people noticed. Viewers evangelized for Up because they saw us rejecting TV norms to pursue truth and dialogue.

We did arcane topics and explained why they mattered, introduced viewers to people with skin in those arcane games. Taking time got viewers invested, created stakes.

We went long with our discussions, which kept viewers longer — even over commercial breaks — than if we skipped from topic to topic. We could build to a cliffhanger rather than tie everything up neatly before the break.

We could peel new layers in our discussions, which is hard for producers with little experience engaging deeply with substance or policy.

We didn’t have the staff to fill two hours with 20 short stories, so we amortized our research on a few long ones. We aired stuff that usually never makes air — the nuance and complication and context and history. The stuff that enlightens instead of enraging.

We succeeded at this because we had a fantastic team.

Most new TV news programs cycle in staff from whatever show previously had the time slot. But Up was expanding MSNBC’s weekend lineup, so there was no previous show. We had to staff from scratch. It was a godsend.

Breaking News

This may be hard to believe, but most TV news executives have never broken a story in their lives. A few have. Some think they have.

Some think breaking a story means an interview subject said something provocative on camera. Look at their bios, talking about what they’ve covered. Very few boast about what they uncovered.

So most have never decided on their own that something untold was worth pursuing, got it, and then figured how to tell it so it felt just as compelling (or more so) than the standard bullshit. These are the most neglected skills in TV news.

You won’t believe this, but when I broke a couple stories at big, famous TV news outlets, the higher-ups were not happy. I had to push internal systems to make scoops happen.

I know how crazy that sounds. But breaking stories was a burden to the system. The executive reaction was dismay. It took me a while to understand that the problem wasn’t the stories. Going first was.

If it fails, you have to defend it to your boss. So there’s no incentive to come up with anything new. No one asks producers to break stories. No one rewards it. It doesn’t come up in performance reviews. Genuinely new stories are a pain in the ass.

How did this happen?

For many leaders in the field, news was a backup. They couldn’t get an entry-level gig at SNL or Fallon. Forget about sports.

They settled for news. Someone showed them how to cut tape or write questions for a guest. After a few years of making the donuts, they’re an executive producer or a vice president who makes the donuts. (There’s a reason so many end up in public relations after TV news; PR was never their enemy¹.)

I’d guess that fewer than 10% have ever broken a substantive story.

That should be horrifying. And the implications are profound.

But even many media critics probably don’t know it. The general public naturally assumes TV news executives are the hard-boiled, capital-J Journalists they know from Hollywood, who rose because they broke stories.

But it’s easy to spot the ones who didn’t.

If the points I’m making here don’t excite them, they should go. If they’ve never created a success, they should go. If their greatest skill is failure-justification, they should go.

If they say it can’t be done, they don’t know how to do it.

If they say it won’t work because it’s boring, they don’t know how to do it.

TV news has far more actual, on-the-ground journalists doing real reporting in Washington than anywhere else. But even the questions they ask seldom open new territory and rarely address anything relevant to most people’s lives.

Typically, they fall into one of three categories:

• Opinion - What’d you think of what Trump said?

• Guesses - Will Democrats/Republicans agree to a thing?

• Timing - When will you do Thing X that we’d find out about anyway?

TV’s DC journalists have extraordinary access to some of the most powerful people on the planet. They could ask myriad questions to serve representative democracy and make actual news.

It’s not their fault that they don’t; their bosses aren’t interested in substance. The execs treat it as axiomatic that politics is a grubby, disingenuous endeavor and Washington its dystopian spawning ground. And then wonder why no one watches.

DC reporters could pursue information that powerful people don’t want to get out. But when’s the last time you saw TV news reveal, for example, which lobbying firm wrote a particular bill?

How come the Beltway media didn’t ask Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) about the Ukrainian evangelical behind his flip to support $61 billion in aid to Ukraine? How come no one asks Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) why he sponsors a Bible study that teaches the antisemitic smear that the Jews killed Jesus?

How come some schlub in New Jersey broke those stories from his couch?

The point is not that TV news should do more story-breaking. The point is that the bosses should be so comfortable being first, being new, that they can counter-program at the macro level and granularly; for instance, in the questions their DC journalists ask.

To pull off its own Moneyball, TV news needs people who know how to go first. Then it might resemble the journalists we see in fiction.

Remember Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom”? Jim, the young, handsome, comic-book-reading producer, was covering the BP oil spill. Which is what I, a handsome, comic-book-reading young producer, was doing when Sorkin came to observe our team at Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

But just as Sorkin’s “The West Wing” served up wish-fulfillment porn of the White House, so, too, The Newsroom and Hollywood generally exaggerate the hard-charging-ness and journalistic chops of TV news².

Outside the silos of “investigative” reporting, TV news isn’t about breaking stories. Or charting its own path. It’s about following others’ stories.

Story Selection

When I started at ABC News in the ‘90s I was stunned to learn how much they outsourced their editorial decision-making to the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Big TV News outlets laughed at Fox’s editorial choices. Then they followed. (First they laugh at you, etc.)

Fox succeeded by using its own judgment, centering stories that didn’t actually matter, issues that affected no one’s real life.

It’s culture-war shit, but it can also be thought of as essentialism: A constant interrogation of national and personal essences. What is America? Who are those people…really?

Fox spotlighted conflicts over the essential nature of people and institutions. Was Obama unpatriotic (in his heart)? Is America a Christian nation (in its soul)?

That these conflicts were irresolvable was a feature, not a bug. What mattered was the passion they provoked, the way they reframed how Americans view their own identity (to devastating effect).

That’s how we found ourselves giving a shit about the War on Christmas. And debating student-athlete gender taxonomies.

Fox didn’t just divide us along partisan lines. It literally created new and stupid schisms by which to divide us. Fox didn’t just tap latent hate, it cultivated new hate by teaching people to care about things that don’t matter to sane adults.

Fox stories demanded we take firm positions on bullshit we hadn’t thought about because we try to be grownups. But their “news” felt like the most important thing in the world.

Of course it matters whether the Black president hates America. Or whether Jesus was cast out of our classrooms. Never mind how infantile those conversations are while millions live in poverty.

The good news is that Fox’s success with essentialism implies that any TV news outlet can counter-counter-program on some other axis that’s not inherently political, without dividing us, without framing things as choices between right and left.

But right now, in most TV news, there’s literally no strategy for story selection. Everyone’s expected to just…know.

What’s now MS NOW, for instance, created a new code of principles that’s described as an in-house guide for decision-making, but it only addresses how to cover the news. It doesn’t interrogate how to decide what should be news in the first place.

Determining newsworthiness isn’t even recognized as a question. It’s just…assumed.

Which is how we get so much garbage in our TV news.

Choosing non-intuitive stories that serve values other than essentialism requires TV news people capable of recognizing such stories. Who can tell them compellingly.

The People

I agree with former CNNer Chris Cillizza, who called out trying to save TV news by shuffling lineups or tweaking superficial elements like the sets. I disagree, however, with his remedy: “It’s about authenticity. …letting people in to see the REAL you.”

Maybe I just don’t want to live in a world where viewers hunger for the raw, unvarnished Wolf Blitzer. But I believe saving TV news is easier than that. It wouldn’t take long. It’d be a lot cheaper. And it’d make more money.

The real problem with the superficial elements — graphics and sets — is that they’re symptoms of producer boredom. In all of visual media, I believe TV news is unique in undercutting the on-screen fruits of millions of production dollars by running counter-programming text on the bottom of the same screen.

How many Hollywood directors slap graphics or b-roll on top of great stars speaking great lines? How many public speakers demand to share the screen with fact nuggets unrelated to what they’re saying?

We have crawls and whiz-bang graphics — some with sound effects! — because producers fear boredom, viewers’ and their own. Bells and whistles give producers something to do in the control room other than, y’know, watch the news.

To staff Up for its launch, Chris and I looked outside TV news for people who could learn to write/produce for TV news but already had what couldn’t be taught: Intellectual curiosity, a disdain for pat answers.

I had to fight the network to hire a guy who ended up giving Up a unique story for our second weekend on the air, generating exactly the kind of positive attention you dream of in your second weekend on the air.

He wasn’t even hired to break stories! That’s how sharp he and the team were.

TV news needs to assemble excellent teams — not necessarily experienced teams — and empower them to do news with recognizable values.

This assumes that the non-Fox billionaire media overlords want to succeed — gain viewers and make money — rather than just fortify epistemic bubbles. But right now they’re failing at both.

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, handpicked by billionaire media overlords, has had many bad ideas symptomatic of the dumb ways seasoned TV news executives think about TV news and success. It says something about the veterans that a newcomer makes the same mistakes.

One of Weiss’s first was to get former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton on CBS to discuss something I don’t remember anymore which is exactly my point. (Four months later, the YouTube video has reached almost 18,000 views. Add in the reported views on the CBS app and we’re just about in 20,000 territory.)

Weiss is by no means alone in this thinking. Many executives, bereft of creativity, self-servingly argue that programs need A-list guests like Oprah, Clooney, or Howard Stern. Which is precisely what CNN threw its money and effort at for the first week of Piers Morgan Tonight. You not remembering that allows me to move on.

More recently, Weiss had something closer to a good idea. Let me lay some groundwork before I defend such a presumptively absurd claim.

As part of its spin-off, MS NOW hired 100 new correspondents and producers. This struck me as odd considering they’re competing with hundreds of millions of people who already live in the field and post everything on social media. It’s hard to imagine winning in TV news by investing in more of what the world is providing instantly for free.

What vision for success requires those 100? Is MS NOW going to be CNN later? Because CNN’s already doing that.

Are those 100 for getting facts? MS NOW already has an Associated Press account. And an internet.

Is it to make sure that MS NOW has video? The AP has video. Earth has more phones than people and Earth’s people are using their phones primarily to create video that MS NOW could use free (or cheap). But also, who watches TV news for the video?

Is it to make sure that MS NOW has someone On The Scene™ when “Something Big” happens? Again, CNN. If it’s so that MS NOW can put someone on the air who knows what they’re talking about, why parachute someone in — who must scramble to get up to speed — when there are already people who know more and will talk for free?

Lack of information and video are definitively not the problems facing TV news. Which brings us to the unique resource TV news does have.

Storytellers

What TV news does have a monopoly on now — but not necessarily forever — is expertise. Actual expertise.

People aren’t going to tune in for TV news later for video they can see right now. What they might tune in for is: What’s the deeper truth behind this thing? That’s why they tune in to Maddow, and even Fox. They want someone they trust to make sense of what they already know.

And yet, most TV news guests are just talking heads, good talkers to speculate or debate. The questions aren’t even geared toward illumination, they solicit guesses or predictions.

When producers don’t know how to make their program interesting, they often hide behind the canard that you need great famous guests.

I was in a meeting once with an executive and producers who all agreed their bookers were at fault for the bookings they themselves had asked for and approved. They had lacked the imagination or courage to order off-menu from a menu they wrote and then blamed the kitchen for making what they ordered.

Even up against myriad digital competitors, TV news is squandering one of its few advantages. Unlike every YouTuber, TikToker, Instagrammer, Substacker, Tweeter, and Twitch streamer, TV news still has unparalleled near-instant access to informed authorities:

• Officials who will take their calls and answer their questions.

• A universe of scholars and practitioners of every subject matter imaginable.

Given this access to both politicos and people who know things, Big TV News is also uniquely able to put both kinds of guests on together. It’s one thing for politicians to debate food stamp cuts with each other; another to debate food stamps with someone on food stamps.

Instead they book guests to share what everyone has: opinions. They chase facts and video everyone has.

TV news could actually use its expertise monopoly to corner the market on telling people not just what’s happening, but why and what it means.

That’s, I hope, what Weiss was reaching for in her recent hire of 19 commentators. I suspect her criteria will undermine the effort, and that the “expertise” may prove too broad to serve individual stories well, but the overall approach isn’t wrong.

For it to work, though, the deployment of expertise needs to be in the service of an editorial strategy that telegraphs unmistakeable values.

CNN Media Reporter Brian Stelter once said, “The biggest journalism bias is toward a good story.”

Stelter was explaining the early interest in Trump. But the point is universal. Neither party may believe it, but TV news decision-making really tends to be driven not by politics but by “Ooh, that’s a good story.”

That would be fine if the instincts behind “Ooh” were informed by the kind of professional training that tells heart surgeons, “Ooh, that’s a good place for an incision.”

But what if the incision point isn’t obvious? What if the most important story is not ooh, a good story?

Unlike heart surgeons, most TV news people only recognize “good” stories anyone would recognize.

When Trump won passage of his big, signature legislation, everyone understood, wow, Trump won a big battle. And that’s what TV news said.

A tougher story would have been: Millions To Lose Food Aid, Health Care.

I know, it’s boring, it’s a bummer. It’s abstract, with no crazy famous guy at center stage.

You might even have to explain the relationship between state and federal Medicaid funding. (Feel that? A great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of producers suddenly cried out in terror and one, solitary Medicaid story was suddenly silenced.)

Unlike heart surgeons, the vast majority of TV news people make the same big decisions most people would make.

That’s why we got endless To Catch A Predators but not one To Catch A Predatory Lender, let alone To Catch A Deregulatory Predator.

I started The Fucking News years ago to test-drive my dual contention that there was enough substantive, important news to discuss every day and that it could be made just as compelling as the outrage du jour.

I wanted to replicate, daily, the DNA of Adam McKay’s movies The Big Short (financial regulation) and Don’t Look Up (climate change). I wanted to render issues that don’t appeal to instinct just as urgent and passion-inspiring as those that do, like whatever stupid shit Trump just said.

But editorial vision isn’t enough.

Strategery

Counter-intuitive story selection needs a storytelling strategy. Look at McKay — he reached outside wonkery and deployed every tool possible to compel interest in wonkery.

And TV news has an advantage movies don’t. It’s on every day. Which means TV news can employ a tactic I call perverse obsession: Sticking with a topic long enough to incur ridicule and then even longer, until the commitment to it generates interest. Like Fox.

Even when people don’t experience something directly as a problem, it can feel as if they do if they see it often enough on TV.

As Trump voter Joshua Breese told the New York Times, “I was so sick and tired of turning on the TV and seeing millions of people flood across the border” that now he’s “happy” about what Trump is doing.

He wasn’t sick and tired of immigrants on his lawn or in his town. He was sick of them on his TV.

“I’m so happy with what they’re doing,” Breese said about Trump’s real-world fix for the problem on his TV. But now it’s created a real problem for Breese in his town, in the form of a new ICE facility. “Do I want it to touch my neighborhood? No.”

Editorial decision-making based on material conditions can refocus America on real problems instead of TV problems. Genuine expertise, well produced, can create compelling, illuminating, non-polarizing, appointment viewing.

So much of our TV news is polarizing precisely because so many of our divisions are superficial. Digging beneath the surface gets us beyond division, gives us room to address good-faith fears and arguments.

Building trust takes time, not keeping it short and simple.

TV news should try longer and different formats for clarifying where there’s legitimate debate about substantive issues. For unpacking misunderstandings and going deeper than our shallow fault lines.

Rejecting TV news rules and violating its norms serves two crucial functions. It doesn’t just liberate programming from toxic formats, it telegraphs your values.

It’s tempting for producers to make the news feel urgent. So of course TV news can fuel anxiety. The aesthetics, even the grammar, can imply that everything’s happening now. Right now. Maybe outside your door!

That erodes trust. Instead, TV news can take the time to break down the news without triggering viewer breakdowns. Unearth some history so that viewers know what we’ve survived before. Add context in which viewers can discern ways out of where we are now.

This builds trust. It makes you a destination.

Weiss’s own distrust in old TV news doesn’t seem to be helping her engender trust. She seems to have defined expertise as anti-institutionalism, just another iteration of the old-media intuition that contrarians are inherently “interesting.”

And Weiss is aiming CBS’s new, putative expertise at the same old stories.

But we need more people at least trying something different instead of just managing decline like the wizards who say it’s inevitable. And we need wizards who believe it’s still possible to make magic.

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POST-CREDITS SCENE I’ve rewritten this multiple times over the years. It was even more self-aggrandizing, believe it or not.

If there’s interest, I can post more specifics about saving TV news.

And if this sounds like sour grapes, because I’m not in TV news anymore, I think the more important question is whether I’m on to something.

I didn’t publish this when I was still trying to get back in to TV news because I though it could either burn bridges or look like I’m trying to get back in. I’m not, because who would want me, but also because I have enough supporters on Substack that I don’t have to.

They’re not just helping me do the journalism I want to do, they’re proving every day that it’s viable. But ultimately, we’ll all fare better if our TV news is better.

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I’m an independent journalist who’s worked at ABC, CNN, MSNBC, UPI, and other outlets. As an executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. I’ve also worked with Dan Rather, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, and was a writer/producer on ABC’s cult favorite World News Now.

1. Disclosure: When I got laid off by The Young Turks I was absolutely willing to sell out and go into PR. I’m on Substack, instead, doing journalism, not because I’m better than anyone who got into PR, but because I failed to.

2. Of the ones I’ve seen, the movie Broadcast News probably comes closest to reality.