Sunday, December 11, 2005
CNN, Fox News Double Up on Chicago Report; Breaking News Good for AC's #'s
Source: Chicago Tribune For a little while Thursday night, as snow swirled around the accident scene at Chicago's Midway Airport, the most important man in all of cable TV news was none other than WFLD-Ch. 32 reporter Dane Placko.
Placko, between live on-scene dispatches for Channel 32, was wrapping up an interview with an area resident as part of a report especially for Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren around 9:40 p.m. when CNN's Anderson Cooper also cut to him.
"I heard Greta in my ear. I was having a conversation with her, but obviously Anderson Cooper was listening in as well," Placko said Friday.
"I was on quite a while with her. It seemed to go fairly well and, as we were wrapping up, I heard [another] voice in my ear--the [Fox] producer in New York, I believe--say, `Oh, by the way, you were also on CNN.' I'm thinking to myself: `Wait a minute. I'm talking to Greta. How can I be on CNN at the same time?'"
The reason is CNN has an affiliate agreement with WFLD, a Fox-owned station, as it does with several other Chicago TV outlets. So it can run material from WFLD, just as archrival Fox News Channel can. But if a reporter is talking directly to one network, it's customary for the other to back off.
"Typically you wouldn't want to show Dane Placko speaking to another network," said David Rhodes, Fox News Channel's director of newsgathering. "You'd wait until that's done and your desk would traffic with WFLD, `OK, can we have Dane when Fox is done with him?' Well, they obviously couldn't wait.
"Dane had something good that he was giving to Greta, so they just took it," Rhodes said. "And that's how you end up in a position where Cooper is showing Dane talking to Greta. The good part of it is Dane Placko is such a star, he's on two channels at once."
The poaching was "unintentional," a CNN spokeswoman said. The network said it looked as though he was just interviewing an eyewitness.
"That's what I would say," Rhodes said. "I would be, `Uh, yeah, we didn't know,' and `It was breaking news.' Those are all my stock answers. You call me back next week if we make a mistake and I'll say the same thing. But how could you not know?"
Copying Fox News Channel has its benefits. While Cooper normally gets clobbered by CNN alumna Van Susteren--since launching in the first week of November, on average, he trails Van Susteren by nearly 1 million viewers in the 9 p.m. hour--the gap Thursday was far smaller, a little more than 400,000.
Placko, between live on-scene dispatches for Channel 32, was wrapping up an interview with an area resident as part of a report especially for Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren around 9:40 p.m. when CNN's Anderson Cooper also cut to him.
"I heard Greta in my ear. I was having a conversation with her, but obviously Anderson Cooper was listening in as well," Placko said Friday.
"I was on quite a while with her. It seemed to go fairly well and, as we were wrapping up, I heard [another] voice in my ear--the [Fox] producer in New York, I believe--say, `Oh, by the way, you were also on CNN.' I'm thinking to myself: `Wait a minute. I'm talking to Greta. How can I be on CNN at the same time?'"
The reason is CNN has an affiliate agreement with WFLD, a Fox-owned station, as it does with several other Chicago TV outlets. So it can run material from WFLD, just as archrival Fox News Channel can. But if a reporter is talking directly to one network, it's customary for the other to back off.
"Typically you wouldn't want to show Dane Placko speaking to another network," said David Rhodes, Fox News Channel's director of newsgathering. "You'd wait until that's done and your desk would traffic with WFLD, `OK, can we have Dane when Fox is done with him?' Well, they obviously couldn't wait.
"Dane had something good that he was giving to Greta, so they just took it," Rhodes said. "And that's how you end up in a position where Cooper is showing Dane talking to Greta. The good part of it is Dane Placko is such a star, he's on two channels at once."
The poaching was "unintentional," a CNN spokeswoman said. The network said it looked as though he was just interviewing an eyewitness.
"That's what I would say," Rhodes said. "I would be, `Uh, yeah, we didn't know,' and `It was breaking news.' Those are all my stock answers. You call me back next week if we make a mistake and I'll say the same thing. But how could you not know?"
Copying Fox News Channel has its benefits. While Cooper normally gets clobbered by CNN alumna Van Susteren--since launching in the first week of November, on average, he trails Van Susteren by nearly 1 million viewers in the 9 p.m. hour--the gap Thursday was far smaller, a little more than 400,000.
# posted by ATN @ 8:18 PM 
