Kathleen Cei Photo

Quinnipiac professors Karin and Bill Schwanback.

Tonight at 6: rape, robbery and car wrecks that'll make your town look like a den of disaster!

Sound familiar? The teasers for your local evening newscast all seem to sound like that. Local news is rife with sensationalism and a disproportionate amount of crime. That's an old story.

But a new documentary by Quinnipiac University professors Karin and Bill Schwanback quantifies how little real news Connecticut viewers are getting. That's the real story.

Deadlines and Dollars follows four local news reporters as they dutifully carry out sucky assignments and feed the "beast," otherwise known as the daily news hole. The reporters cover two or three stories a shift, and rewrite a single crime story as many as four times for successive newscasts.

On WFSB Channel 3, crime and spot news (those on-location reports that jazz up a newscast) typically get 58 percent of total news coverage, the film says, while government stories get just five percent. WTNH Channel 8 also does 58 percent crime/spot news, and 10 percent government. Lending credence to the "if it bleeds, it leads" cliché, crime and grime lead Channel 8's newscasts 70 percent of the time and Channel 3's 80 percent of the time!

The film's stats were drawn from a six-week survey of 11 p.m. newscasts in 2006.

"There are some wonderfully talented reporters in this market. To have to go on the air and cover these crime and spot news, accidents and fires..." Schwanback says in an interview at her Quinnipiac office. "What a waste of intellect and talent."

In the film, those reporters appear resigned to covering crime and accidents, and not one seems to really enjoy it.

"There's the water cooler stories, then there's the more in-depth pieces people remember," Channel 8 reporter Annie Rourke says. "The rest of it—I don't think they remember it five minutes later."

Channel 3 reporter Len Besthoff says he's "not real thrilled" with the arrangement. "There's a place for crime news, but I think it is way over-weighted right now," he says in the film. "There may be empirical data saying that's what people want."

There may be, but it would be notoriously unreliable. The average viewer makes a bad survey subject, says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the D.C.?based Project for Excellence in Journalism, one of the experts interviewed in the film. "If you ask people in a survey, 'Tell me what kind of stories you'd like to see,' the average person doesn't know what kind of stories could be done. All they really know is they reference the stories they've seen."

Karin Schwanback doesn't blame the reporters; she blames corporate news executives more concerned with profits for themselves and shareholders than with quality journalism. (WFSB is owned by Meredith Corp.; WTNH by LIN Television.) Crime and spot news are easy to produce with fewer reporters, which keeps costs down and profit margins up. Unlike the newspaper industry, which sees profits in the 18 percent range, TV networks are posting 40 to 50 percent profits.

Schwanback says she just as easily could have focused the film on photographers, editors or news directors. "They're all facing the same problem: They're working for publicly traded companies in which the mandate is to make a profit," she says, but chose reporters because she's sympathetic to their dilemma.

The Schwanbacks both teach journalism at Quinnipiac and spent decades in the TV news biz—Karin covering news, Bill sports—before hanging up their mics and entering academia. It took 18 months and 53 tapes to make the documentary, which has been shown at the university and was accepted into the New Film Makers New York festival.

Oddly, Karin Schwanback blames media executives for the state of local TV journalism yet didn't seek interviews with any of them.

"They probably wouldn't talk," she says. "I guess if I were to do the bigger picture, then it would be a matter of doing the Michael Moore thing—knocking on the doors, 'Okay, now why is it that you demand higher profits every quarter and don't hire enough reporters?' Maybe that's another documentary."

abromage@newhavenadvocate.com