Published: November 07, 2007 12:52 pm            

LUCINSKI: Trying to feel sorry for the girl on the yacht

here’s a saying I learned way back when from a journalist whose name I can’t remember at a job I can’t remember. I remember the saying, though. He told me, “Nobody cries for a girl on a yacht.”

What does that mean? Simple. It means that it’s 0difficult to evoke sympathy for a rich person. The person who passed along that pearl of wisdom was trying to explain news value, illustrating what people would like to read about, listen to on the radio or watch on television.

There is a lot of wisdom in that saying. If some tragedy, major or minor befalls someone of average or modest means, our hearts go out to them. If the same thing happens to a rich person, it’s like: So what. They have money.

It doesn’t matter that things like cancer and infant death and the loss of a loved one know no economic level. That green-eyed monster that lives in most of us (some small, some huge) somehow makes us feel that the wealthy are getting a payback for being rich; that it brings them to our level.

The latest people who are on that yacht and looking for some sort of consideration are those who write for the television programs we watch.

The union representing those writers went out on strike early Monday. The writers want more money from the sale of DVDs and a share of revenue generated by the sale of TV shows and films over the Internet. The studios say the demands are unreasonable and would hamper attempts to experiment with new media.

The first casualty of the strike were late-night talk shows, which are dependent on current events to fuel monologues and other entertainment.

Daytime TV, including live talk shows such as “The View” and soap operas, which typically tape about a week of shows in advance, would be next to feel the impact.

There is some logic to both sides. The writers say they should be compensated for their work that’s distributed over what’s known as the new media. The studios and networks claim that would stifle innovation and that margins are already thin enough without paying more to writers.

But the public’s take on all this, as it is with many other public disputes, has little to do with logic. They see rich executives battling with rich workers (one report said working TV and film writers make an average of $200,000 a year).

So if this goes on for a while and Joe and Mary sitting in their living room can’t get their new, non-repeat episode of “Ugly Betty,” they’ll probably throw up their hands, say a pox on both their houses and do something really radical. Like read a book. Or a newspaper, where writers are paid far, far less than those in Hollywood and rarely travel on yachts.

•••

Speaking of television, as of today we’re done with those ads, those political ads. Either they try to make you feel warm and fuzzy about the candidate who pays for them or they cast his or her opponent as a mean and nasty scalawag.

For the next election, here’s a lesson for the campaigns that use television in promoting their particular candidate: You should be careful of what ad follows yours.

It happened at about 7:45 Sunday morning on WNYO, CW-23 in Buffalo. We saw an ad showing what a nice guy Chris Collins, the Republican candidate for Erie County executive, is. It went on and on about how he is not a career politician, how he rescued failing companies and saved jobs. It even closed with the requisite shot of Chris surrounded by children.

Immediately following that ad was what in the business is called a promo, an advertisement for an upcoming show. This one promoted an episode of one of the CW network’s most popular programs.

It began, “On the next ‘Everybody Hates Chris’...” I couldn’t hear the rest of it. I was laughing too loud.

Dick Lucinski is the managing editor of the Niagara Gazette.

        

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