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Time was when TV Guide was a kind of Bible. If you wanted to know which "Bat Channel" to tune into, it was right there in those weekly listings. But the magazine recently decided to transform into itself a full-sized glossy, with pared down listings and more emphasis on celebrity. Blogger and veteran TV Guide staffer Jeff Jarvis tells Bob that print listings are a thing of the past.
Reality shows offer a glimpse of real life, unmediated by script-writers or story boards. Right? Wrong, says Daniel Petrie, Jr., president of the Writers Guild of America, west. According to Petrie, reality show editors serve the same function as traditional writers, piecing together story arcs out of hundreds of hours of raw tape. And thus, he tells Brooke, they should be recognized under the same union rules that govern traditional TV contracts.
Fans of the enormously popular The Daily Show are by now quite familiar with the conceit of fake journalists asking inane questions of real subjects. And so you'd think that by now, the show would have run out of unsuspecting interview guests. Not so. Co-executive producer Stewart Bailey tells Bob that most people, in fact, knowingly participate in the alternate reality of the mock news segment. It's an assertion confirmed by Newsday film critic Gene Seymour, who recounts his own "Daily Show" experience for Brooke.
16 years ago, TV producer Charles Lewis left "60 Minutes" to found the Center for Public Integrity. In the years since, the Center has become the largest non-profit investigative journalism organization in the world, uncovering some of last decade's most important political stories. Lewis, who left the Center earlier this year, tells Bob about the mainstream media's appetite for his muckraking.
Watching TV health news may be bad for your health. That's according to Gary Schwitzer, a 14-year veteran of the television health journalism biz. But he thinks that a lot of the journalistic malpractice could be ameliorated if voluntary certification were available to health reporters, the same way it is for broadcast meteorologists. Journalists usually cringe at any mention of "licensing," but as Schwitzer tells Bob, this is different.
The American media's portrait of Africa is constructed from images of war, of famine, of AIDS - as well as soft-focus fodder like The Lion King. But seldom do the continent's 53 countries have the power to define their own portrayals. James Makawa, a longtime NBC News correspondent originally from Zimbabwe, tells Bob that he aims to change all that with the launch of the Africa Channel.
With so many real-life jurors raised on a diet of tightly-scripted courtroom dramas, what's a real-life attorney to do? Call Neal Howard. The longtime scriptwriter for shows like King of Queens also works as a trial consultant, advising attorneys on how to enliven their arguments and capture the attention of the jury. Brooke speaks with Howard about what the U.S. legal system can learn from Hollywood.
On the 80th anniversary of the Scopes monkey trial, we look back on the original trial of the century - a case that pitted Darwin against Adam, and redefined the media's role in the courtroom. University of Georgia history professor Edward Larson tells Brooke how the Scopes case revolutionized trial coverage, and launched the legal system towards the era of Court TV.
