pointed perspectives and penetrating punditry
An Ego Trip Gone Haywire
A few years back, I got a call from a good-hearted soul, name long forgotten, who asked me if I would participate in a--hang on--"Celebrity Dunk-a-Thon."
I politely declined. It wasn't that I didn't want to help. It's just that I thought the donors would scarcely get their money's worth were they to pay to dunk me. "If I'm a celebrity," I thought, "we're all in trouble."
When the person asked if I could think of someone who might be willing, I drew a blank. Had my mind been clearer, I would have suggested the one local "celebrity" who would likely welcome a public dunking--and who richly deserves one to boot.
War of the Rose
Steve Rose startled philanthropic Kansas City last month when he decided to "go public" in the Sun newspaper and blast KCPT-19 management for its "ego trip gone haywire."
KCPT is the town's public TV station, the very same one that transformed Rose from just another pretty face on his family-owned suburban shopper into a full-blown TV star with a Q rating somewhere between Anne Peterson and Colonel Billy.
In his take-no-prisoners attack on KCPT, Rose argues that station executives had "lavishly transformed" their facilities with the money raised in a recent capital campaign and left themselves short on operating expenses as a result. To describe the collateral damage from this recklessness, Rose uses the "neutron bomb" as metaphor, the kind of bomb, says Rose, "that leaves the buildings intact and kills everything inside."
In Steve's defense, I don't think he means to strike so hard or wound so deeply. For all his writing skills, he is still a little shaky on things like tone and nuance. His control of metahor is also a wee bit suspect, given that the one in question contradicts itself on either end.
No, the metaphoric neutron bomb obviously did not leave the facility "intact." What troubles Rose is that in their allegedly lavish transformation, station executives turned the facility into a "Taj Mahal."
Nor did the bomb kill "everything." If it had, Steve would have had no gripe. In fact, 80% of the staff survived the bomb, and so did a good deal of the local programming. But here's the rub, and here's the reason for the article: "Ruckus," the show that made Steve worthy of a dunk-a-thon in the first place, was irradiated out of existence.
Inappropriately Modest
In addition to tone, nuance and metahor, the otherwise gifted Rose also struggles with hyperbole--that is, exaggeration for effect. So when he claims that the station was once "appropriately modest" and is now "outright grandiose," the reader takes him at his word.
In Steve's defense once more, I think he was joking, or at least I hope he was. I have an advantage here. I have not only visited all the other local TV stations, as Rose claims to, but I have also produced at several, including KCPT-TV. For the record, KCPT has aired six of my documentaries, three of which I produced at the station (and one of which won an Emmy), all in the mid-to late 1990s.
There were a few things I learned working at KCPT. One was not to leave food out over night or the rats might get at it. A second was to wear something warm as the joint was as cold and drafty as the Greyhound Bus station it eerily resembled. And the third was to carefully calibrate my dashes to the parking lot across busy 31st Street lest I get hit by an 18-wheeler--a prospect made all the more troubling as the studio was not handicap-accessible.
But these problems were only superficial. The real problem was technology. KCPT had the only coal burning editing suites in the non-Amish world. I joke, but only a little. We were, in fact, editing on equipment no better than you would find at your average community college--if that good.
Video production is an enormously volatile, capital-intensive business. KCPT-TV was facing an FCC mandated switch to full digital technology in 2003 and quite simply had to adapt. A capital campaign, complains Rose, took the station's equipment "deep into the 21st century." In truth, KCPT would have been squandering its patrons' money had management not gone as far technologically as it could safely anticipate. There is no point changing everything out two years hence.
As to the physical renovation, KCPT still looks like a Greyhound station, but one with a fresh coat of paint, a new entrance with an actual sign on it, a parking lot where one ought to be and, yes, a studio that is finally handicap- accessible. Channels 5 and 41 have decidedly plusher facilities.
True, KCPT did cut staff 20%. But if anything, management should have cut it more and sooner. Historically, public TV stations have been run big-heartedly like the not-for-profits they are. This, however, one can do only when times are flush. And today, they simply ain't.
Where's the beef?
Lord knows I have had my own gripes with KCPT-TV, especially on programming issues. But I have never gone public because it is the town's one serious media outlet, other than Ingram's, in which I can and do get a fair hearing, even if I don't always get what I want.
Plus, as a producer, I can always go to another studio or another network. Steve Rose cannot. Only a KCPT would run a show as controversial as "Ruckus." The show was heady stuff for Rose. For seven years on this spirited five-way debate program, he held forth in the genteel Johnson County chair of conspicuous self-satisfaction, defending the county's prerogatives from corruption without and Calvinism within.
Rose was much better on TV than in print. He has a solid TV presence and is not afraid to speak his mind, the latter a rare virtue in Kansas City. In its early years, when the irrepressible Rich Nadler could play off my old homey Steve Glorioso, the show worked. Over time, it greased Rose's passage into what the British would call "the chattering class" and made him a genuine heartthrob in the produce aisles of the county's Price Choppers.
And then, just like that, it was over. Although Rose assures the reader that there is nothing "personal" about his broadside against KCPT, the article screams of attention deprivation. Indeed, he spends half of it decrying the demise of "Ruckus," as if our inability to watch the show was as traumatic as our "seeing a public station come unraveled." One would be more likely to credit Rose's civic high-mindedness were it not for the fact that he has a track record. A few years back, after selling the Sun publications for enough money to buy his own TV station, Rose took legal action against the new publishers for failing to keep his column (and mug) on the front page, an obligation he built into the deal. Apparently, he hated to see a private newspaper come unraveled as well.
No, this is altogether personal and not at all fair.
The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's.
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