What's Wrong With the TV News

MBCook writes "Technology Review has a fantastic seven page piece titled "You Don't Understand Our Audience" by former Dateline correspondent John Hockenberry. In it he discusses how NBC (and the networks at large) has missed and wasted opportunities brought by the Internet; and how they work to hard to get viewers at the expense of actual news. The story describes various events such as turning down a report on who al-Qaeda is for a reality show about firefighters, having to tie a story about a radical student group into American Dreams, and the failure to cover events like Kurt Cobain suicide (except as an Andy Rooney complaint piece)."

Comments

Very very simple to answer...

[yroJJory]

What's wrong with TV news? It receives Nielsen Ratings. That means they are not treated as informational, but rather as entertainment and require audience share (in the eyes of those who watch the "bottom line").

And I'm not the only one who thinks this. There are papers about this very subject.

Hate to respond to my own post, but...

[ChePibe]

Might I recommend highly the Newshour with Jim Lehrer to all readers?

The program features actual experts. That don't yell over each other. Each has time to form a response to questions. It's amazing, astounding, the best TV news available, period.

Re:Call Jon Stewart

[Anonymous Coward]

He and Colbert are returning on Monday, although no one knows what format their shows will be yet.

Re:The trouble with TV (why print rules)

[yo_tuco]

"30 f/s x 30 sec x 1000 w/p (words per picture)=???"

I don't want to pick the fly shit out of the pepper, but...

That equals 900,000 frame words per picture

How about: 30 frame/sec x 30 sec x 1000 words/frame?

Reporting Is Expensive, Pundits are Cheap

[EXTomar]

One of the major problems with TV reporting is that the costs of doing real news worthy reporting for a 5 minute on air segment is astronomical compared to just calling up some "expert" to talk about what they think happened. And as it turns out, the pundit probably scores better for most demographics (ie. they look better, sound better).

We saw this happen (again) with the run up to the Iraq War where it would have taken months of reporters actually doing the research and tracking leads to develop a story that many people would find uncomfortable if not right hostile. The alternative is that they call up some retired military guy and ask him "What do you think is going on?" Almost every news source in the US opted for the cheaper pundits than the expensive reporting and we got exactly what we paid for.

Then don't watch American News!

[Phoenix666]

Watch BBC news coverage of America. They're far worthier of that appellation than any outlet in the United States, and they also mostly don't give a crap which political party or corporation they might offend by reporting the facts. As an additional plus, they are the one media operation that Rupert Murdoch can't buy and subvert.

It seems many other Americans agree, because the BBC news seems to have grown from being on only one channel (BBC America) morning and night, to four.

Re:Yeah, read this yesterday

[ThousandStars]

Interestingly enough, Bob Woodward came to speak at Clark University when I was an undergrad, and during the Q & A some idiot got up and blathered a conspiratorial question about the CIA and censorship that was about as stupid as your post. Woodward responded with something to the effect of, "Do you think anyone could stop me from publishing something that's true?" he went on to say?" It was a rhetorical question from someone who actually knows what's he's talking about directed at a fool weaned on Internet conspiracy theories, and it was as effective a silencer of your type as I've ever seen.

Re:Two words!

[Anonymous Coward]

Two other major milestones in cheapening/dumbing down the news: the realization that 60 Minutes made money (transforming newsrooms, reluctantly, from loss leaders into profit centers) and CNN's part in creating the need for something, anything to fill the 24-hour news cycle.

But better than Lehrer is Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC. All the important stories, no yelling or talking over each other, no lying right-wing blowhards (I can't take Pat Buchanan's voice anymore), and while there is celebrity news, at least he openly begrudges having to report it. Plus, do you notice he turns off the CRAWL? THANK YOU! There's a whole generation growing up with nystagmus because of that.

Six Sigma

[MillionthMonkey]

Oh geez, Six Sigma was involved in this disaster! No wonder the news sucks!

GE had acquired NBC back in 1986, when it bought RCA. By 2003, GE's managers and strategists were getting around to seeing whether the same tactics that made the production of turbine generators more efficient could improve the production of television news. This had some truly bizarre consequences. To say that this Dateline correspondent with the messy corner office greeted these internal corporate changes with self-destructive skepticism is probably an understatement.
  Six Sigma--the methodology for the improvement of business processes that strives for 3.4 defects or fewer per million opportunities--was a somewhat mysterious symbol of management authority at every GE division. Six Sigma messages popped up on the screens of computers or in e-mail in-boxes every day. Six Sigma was out there, coming, unstoppable, like a comet or rural electrification. It was going to make everything better, and slowly it would claim employees in glazed-eyed conversions. Suddenly in the office down the hall a coworker would no longer laugh at the same old jokes. A grim smile suggested that he was on the lookout for snarky critics of the company. It was better to talk about the weather.
While Six Sigma's goal-oriented blather and obsession with measuring everything was jarring, it was also weirdly familiar, inasmuch as it was strikingly reminiscent of my college Maoism I class. Mao seemed to be a good model for Jack Welch and his Six Sigma foot soldiers; Six Sigma's "Champions" and "Black Belts" were Mao's "Cadres" and "Squad Leaders."

I became painfully familiar with Six Sigma working at a large tech company (it's so large, its stock symbol is a single letter). That's a fairly accurate description of what it was like working there.

I'm surprised to hear that Six Sigma even makes the production of turbine generators more efficient. I actually doubt this. Six Sigma is a management fad, and it's hard to identify exactly what it brings to the table. In fact, although I had to put up with it for so long, I'm still at a loss to describe it. Maybe this excerpt from its Wikipedia page will help:

Six Sigma is a set of practices originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects.[1] A defect is defined as nonconformity of a product or service to its specifications.
While the particulars of the methodology were originally formulated by Bill Smith at Motorola in 1986[2], Six Sigma was heavily inspired by six preceding decades of quality improvement methodologies such as quality control, TQM, and Zero Defects. Like its predecessors, Six Sigma asserts the following:
Continuous efforts to reduce variation in process outputs is key to business success
Manufacturing and business processes can be measured, analyzed, improved and controlled
Succeeding at achieving sustained quality improvement requires commitment from the entire organization, particularly from top-level management
The term "Six Sigma" refers to the ability of highly capable processes to produce output within specification. In particular, processes that operate with six sigma quality produce at defect levels below 3.4 defects per (one) million opportunities (DPMO)[3]. Six Sigma's implicit goal is to improve all processes to that level of quality or better.

Essentially what happens is that people at managerial levels have no idea what to do, and they reach toward this thing as a canned recipe for how to do their jobs. And it certainly wastes a lot of time, since you have to get training and attend seminars, and it certainly impresses people who confuse activity with progress. It sure as hell generates a lot of Powerpoint slides. It also seems to have a cult-like quality to it. Six Sigma directives come raining down from the highest levels of management and the urgency behind them is palpable- and everyone is freaked because it's all incredibly important but nobody understands what it is.

Very Simple - BIAS

[SengirV]

The bias towards the left is soooo amazingly palpable that it turns a lot of viewers off. Ever wonder why Fox news has sooo many viewers compared to the rest? Because people are sick of hearing about how America sucks all the time. If there is a positive economic indicator, the MSM(CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, etc...) will twist it to somehow be negative and Bush's fault. When Clinton was in office, the MSM would grasp at anything to report as a positive economically. And that is just one example. Take the unquestioned "humans are the cause for global warming", "guns kill people, not other people", "religious right is responsible for all the ills in America", "America's wealthy are the cause for all the ills in the world thus making terrorist attack on civilians somehow justified", "macabre lovefest with anything Brittney, Lohan, Paris, pretty white girl/woman killed", etc... and the news is unwatchable.

It's actually very similar to the dumbing down of other networks like ESPN. ESPN is unwatchable anymore because rather than report the sports new, they have Stu Scott trying to "ghetto" up the news, and they would rather concentrate on the Patriots 90% of the time when discussing football, rather than talk about the other 31 teams in the league. Much like the MSM, there are protected teams/figures(regular news, it's Clinton and the Democrats), like the patriots, Indy, Brady, Peyton Manning, LT, etc...

Re:Yeah, read this yesterday

[Paladin144]

You are so naive. It's cute. But also a little sad.

The problem is that you were listening to the sellout half of Woodward & Bernstein. His former partner Carl Bernstein wrote an article about the CIA's infiltration of the mainstream media (it's called Operation Mockingbird and it's no conspiracy theory. It's conspiracy fact) and was never heard from in the MSM again.

So, tell me again how my "type" is silenced again?