Dr. Ink doesn’t watch much television on Sunday morning. Like other mainstream, middle-class Americans he and his wife Inka are:
1. Still asleep.
2. Makin’ whoopee.
3. Still asleep.
4. Out for breakfast.
5. In church.
6. Still asleep.
For some reason, the Domingo Doc found himself in front of the tube tuned in to CBS Sunday Morning. This show used to be hosted by the on-the-road guy (Charles Kuralt) and is now run by the news-poet guy (Charles Osgood). Though Kuralt is dead, Osgood is very much alive, though he represents a dying breed.
But Doc’s hope is that CBS Sunday Morning will go on at least until Osgood climbs the golden staircase. In short, Dr. Ink was blown away by the quality of storytelling on CBS last Sunday morning, by the length and depth of pieces, by their careful and respectful pace, by their poetic marriage of words and visuals.
Doc’s normal reflex would be to click his remote to ESPN, but he couldn’t pull the trigger, not in the face of such excellent work by CBS. One piece told the story of how Hershey Chocolate may be sold to Nestle. Conventional wisdom proclaims that television is primarily an emotional medium, one in which complexity is difficult to communicate. The Hershey piece showed the shallowness of that argument.
Combining a Rockwellian sense of place with some nifty images of chocolate manufacturing with some old-fashioned number crunching, the CBS story revealed a complex relationship between a town and the company that gave it its identity. It was feature writing merged with business writing merged with cultural reporting.
“Wow,” thought Doc as his complexion started to break out from visual exposure to all that chocolate. “What could top that?”
What followed was another excellent feature, this one a television obituary of the great jazz musician Lionel Hampton. Using archival footage, the producers created a beautiful tapestry of a life well spent. Not only did the piece let us see and hear a jazz legend at various stages of his career, but we learned what an important contribution he and his fellow musicians, black and white, made toward the eventual destruction of American apartheid.
Dr. Ink was so enthusiastic about these stories that he rushed to work to share what he had seen with his colleague Al Tompkins. Al wondered aloud if there wasn’t some inverse relationship between the quality of news presentation and the size of the audience. A “small” audience like the ones served by NPR or CBS Sunday Morning seem to get some of the best storytelling we know how to offer. What’s up with that?
