The News Blues

tune in to the mouse-car moment for an exclusive report on the one thing your local news affiliate doesn't want you to know

Oct 26, 2023

Unqualified

In March of this year I cold-called Channel 8 news and asked for a job as their lead anchor, or at least executive producer. They informed me that those positions were currently occupied by lifelong professionals, and that my experience in the field (none) didn’t quite qualify me anyhow. Confused by my resume, they offered me another post— Night Photographer— and an impending un-payable rent bill plus the capitalistic sense of non-existence that comes on the tail end of five unemployed months beckoned me into the world of News Media.

My official job title was ironic, seeing that to this day I couldn’t tell you the difference between Gain, F-Stop, ND Filter, and exposure. As far as I can tell they all have to do with the amount of light which enters through the lens. In my seven months here I’ve yet to find the chance to google it, and even now as I write this piece I just can’t seem to open that tab and find out. One morning, while filming the bloody aftermath of a deadly crash on I-64, one of the anchors shouted out “Photojournalist Ryan Matera,” and I’ve since adopted the label. I recommend trying this— titles are entirely fabricated constructs, and it behooves every McDonald’s drive-thru employee to consider themselves a ‘Customer Liaison,’ every receptionist to print ‘Executive Handler’ on their business cards.

From one to ten a.m. every weekday I climb belligerent into my news van and cruise the streets of Charleston listening to cops make fun of homeless people on the scanner; I stand behind caution tape as detectives collect blood samples and if your house burns to the ground in the dead of night, be sure that I will arrive, rack focus, and ask a firefighter if there are any bodies inside. Sometimes the job is less gory. This morning I interviewed the Director of Public Works as he sent seventeen snow plows on dry runs around the city. Sometimes it’s worse. Yesterday I drove 90 minutes south to Beckley to speak with a public prosecutor who issued indictments on four un-solved murders from the last twenty-four years. I recorded a crying man, well into his seventies, who spoke of the feeling of finally being able to bring his deceased daughter home after two decades of uncertainty. I was told, off the record, that the senile suspect would never be convicted in his bygone medical state, and that between him & I, the man mysteriously only experienced dementia when details of the murder were discussed.

Empires of evil are necessarily staffed from the bottom to just short of the top by decent people. This weekend I held a hungover conversation with an opera singer whose parents forced her down the medical track. She reluctantly worked for two years as an apprentice to a pharmacist, her job mainly involving the delivery of medication to people’s doors. In West Virginia. Amidst an opioid epidemic. In her words, there is non-zero chance that she handed someone the direct cause of their death. She wonders what it would take to atone for that peripheral relationship to utter heinousness. She hopes that, somehow, her involvement in that world will serve her, will influence her work as an artist, will be converted into good. In the same way we all walk around with blood on our hands, and the ethical among us try our best to justify it, in the best of cases to convert it to karmic balance, at the very least to remain conscious. And yet we wonder.. is this essay enough to off-set what went into building the laptop it was written on?

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I am bad at my job. Like any good American, I hate my job, but like a good artist I am also bad at it. I take naps. Lots of naps. One on my lunch break (3am), one before my first live shot (4:45), one just after (5:15), and depending on the sunrise, an additional two to four throughout the rest of my shift. A conservative estimate would put my record at nine naps in one work day. Lift the folded down back-seat of my work car and you’ll find a blanket and a pillow. Open the Alarm app on my phone and you’ll find a treasure chest of pre-sets between the hours of three and seven. I’ve heard of night-nurses fired for similar injunctions, but I’m a notoriously sly fellow, and was only caught once when a woman in Kanawha City (of course) called the station and reported a sleeping reporter in a heavily decal’ed van at the bottom of her cul-de-sac. Rivals from Channel 13 often see me sipping champagne at 11 p.m. on salsa night and ask if I have work in two hours. “Yes,” I say. “Care to dance?”

I am bad at my job because it is my civil duty as a vaguely political Gen-Z’er to be bad at it. Because being good at my job means playing along with the sort of fear-mongering which oughta stand trial for much of the unrest of the past ten years, the sort which oughta be left in the 20th century, and which just might, seeing that absolutely no one under the age of sixty watches local news. When I tell people that I work for both 88.1 FM and Channel 8, they tell me, “I love 88.1!” implying that while they have some vague notion that an eighth channel exists, they have never watched it between the hours of five and eight in the morning. They probably assume it is stocked tit-high with hogwash and they are correct. And that’s a shame. Journalism is a broken system, alongside education and blogging1. The vast majority of those who enter it do so for the right reason, and are quickly met with criminally low pay-checks and obscene directives from corporate elites who profit mightily off turmoil.

I am bad at my job because I am a dissident. When it’s my job to edit VO/SOTS2 I tend to focus on lilacs whipping in a morning breeze and not the white sheet being pulled over the victim of a drunk driver. When I edit a package about Trump indictments I cut out the orange man entirely, and replay footage of boxes hid in Mar-a-Lago cellars, employing all the slow pans and dissolve-transitions at my disposal in Avid Media Composer. When choosing a sound-bite from a gun auction you bet I’m clipping that hesitant stumble over your words, officer, and not your eloquent diatribe on inter-departmental cooperation.

I am bad at my job, and the cost of this is a lot of my co-workers not liking me very much. And can you blame them? Right now they are scouring the internet for mugshots of a couple who locked their adopted children in a tool-shed while I write an essay about choosing not to help. They went to school for this, their roles are far more complicated than mine, and yet we all make the same amount of money. I have a work-issued 2023 Subaru and iPhone 11, and they don’t. We all have to hustle. I am surrounded by rappers who program tax-software, by poet-baristas and criminal defense lawyers who want nothing more than to bring musicians together and make CDs to pass around town. There is a substantial beauty to performing the bare minimum required to make firing you more hassle than it’s worth for your billion-dollar parent company. To all my brilliant, disgruntled co-workers I say if you want to report the news then start a podcast, interview the victims of flooding caused by neglected infrastructure, and show up late to work. Be worse at this, for the sake of your soul, be far worse.

On uneventful mornings my job takes on a poetic simplicity, and in lieu of live-streaming carnage my job will be to find a pretty tree, frame a nice-looking shot, and stream it back to the station so they can cut to it as they head to commercial break. In this pursuit I’ve scoured every inch of this city for pleasant glimpses of our little skyline, for the occasional gothic high-rise catching the early glints of sunrise. I’ve set up my tripod and rolled on deer noshing on freshly fallen beechnuts, on black cats perched on artistically-placed pumpkins, on that mysterious Kanawha-valley fog which sets stubbornly, doesn’t move an inch. I light a cigarette and pull my hat over my eyes, lean back in the crisp fall air and contemplate jazz. The city below me is safe. There is no breaking story, no Crisis in the Classroom, no questionable pay practices, no reason at all to post up outside city hall. In one of these moments a month or two ago, I decided to pull up the live-stream and watch, for the first time, the news. I found friends of mine teasing stories about Netflix fee-hikes and canine-abusers before throwing to a commercial, first hyping a “Live Look at our State’s Capitol Building,” my shot gracing the air in all its splendor, bold and imaginative, dare I say artistic, and 90% covered by an advertisement for Lester Raines Honda dealership.

You get a certain amount of time and energy and the great burden of modern life is being able to choose what to do with it. Might I suggest over-clocking your hours, subverting your bosses demands, snoozing on the job? It’s nine o’clock, I have work in four hours. I am dusting off my dancing shoes. It’s salsa night, motherfucker.