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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)."
I have worked in and around newsrooms from college on and I know, firsthand, where much of the problem lies. Journalism, that is, the finding and reporting of facts, has little to do with a journalism major, which is primarily interested in "the proper form." As the article says, "the emotional center," or, more specifically, an insulated and insular group of people attempting to capture the attention of the audience.
There was a study done on mid-level news markets about eight or nine years ago, and what they found is that reporters have a lot in common with one another. They tend to rent, not to buy. (This is quite understandable, as "two weeks notice" doesn't happen in news; more often a person finds out of Friday that they don't need to come back on Monday.) They tend to live in the city rather than suburban or rural areas. (Again, understandable given the commute.) They tend to be single rather than married (stability issues again) and use certain services more than others-- transit, fitness centers, and so on. The upshot was that the necessary living patterns for reporters-- again, not big-city reporters, but mid-market types-- meant both that a certain point of view was attracted to the lifestyle, and that the point of views of the people involved would necessarily change.
And that viewpoint-- we're not talking political here, though it does play a role-- agrees with 2% of the wider US population. Two percent.
Or in other words, the viewpoints of 98% of the population are foreign to the average reporter. Moreover, the average reporter is your typical person, which by and large means the vast majority of them are, basically, lazy. How many of you just get through your day, doing the basic minimum that your job requires? Well, imagine what that's like as a reporter, when you don't have somebody breathing down your neck to report the facts, but instead have them breathing down your neck to "find the emotional center." That reporter's going to find the emotional center, and is almost certainly going to do so using a mental template (Insert Issue A into Slot B and add Cute Kid/Pet/Quip at end.) You end up with lazy reporting.
Lazy reporting gets you those stories about farmers that always seem to imply that they must be hicks, or slow, or obsessed with "weird things" because they aren't smart/hip/normal enough to move to the city, like "real people." Or the ones that as what [X racial group] thinks about a subject, as if a vast group of people who share a few alleles must have similar opinions. Or, in the most common template of them all, the good little underdog against the evil corporation/city council/religious group.
Why do I get my news online? Because a well-done story, linked back to source documents and complete transcripts, is yards and away from "San Francisco tiger mauls two and kills one; blood and guts at eleven" (past teasers and grainy footage and the obligatory Horrified Bystander.) I know what news is, and I don't confuse it with reality-entertainment.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
A pretty good piece.
But it's not new. You can go back to Aleister Crowley complaining about the press (and he was a "celebrity" who constantly ended up in the press) being a bunch of hacks with an agenda - and that was back in the late 1800's. Hitler said the same thing except he blamed it all on the Jews.
Some years back former CIA director William Casey publicly said that ALL the mainstream media was either owned (through fronts) or controlled by the CIA. He wasn't joking when he said it.
I see nothing on the air to discredit that statement. Quite a few people have pointed out that large numbers of (supposedly) "ex"-CIA analysts are doing the writing and editing for most of the major media - even including some of the (supposedly) left wing "alternative" media. The excuse is that CIA analysts are good at producing concise, condensed recaps of analytical material - which makes them great journalists.
Except as General Gogol said, "Nobody ever leaves the KGB."
And once you get beyond the CIA, you've got corporate interests - and beyond, corporate stupidity - and beyond that, personal incompetence and stupidity.
How "news" could survive that chain of barriers without being completely useless is beyond me.
Look at today - we've got a bit of "news" coming out of India that supposedly Benazir Bhutto was shot with some kind of laser gun!
Right. I'll buy that for a dollar. More disinformation to confuse the matter, so that anybody who thinks she was killed by the Pakistani government looks like a "conspiracy nut".
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
For the most part I agree. Kurt Cobain had a decent following and was becoming very popular and influential (from what I understand). It really wasn't covered at all. You can make an argument for that (like you did, and I largely agree that celebrities shouldn't be covered). But ABC did decided to cover him... not through a real piece, or a little 1 hour documentary, but through insulting him as a joke for Andy Roony.
I get my news from John Steward, Steven Colbert, NPR, and the 'net. The first two are funny and cover a good mix of stuff. NPR does a pretty good job on the whole, with much better coverage of world events and more interesting in depth stories than I'd get from my other sources. The 'net supplements everything with tons of detailed coverage of the things that I care quite a bit about (like technology) that would include topics too esoteric for more mainstream coverage.
But many evenings I'll watch 15 minutes or so of news while I'm cooking or eating dinner. I watch NBC, ABC, or CBS. Local or national, whichever is on. It never ceases to amaze me just how BAD it is. The reporting on local events doesn't cover much, except to say there was a fire here or a robbery here. The national news tends to cover celebrity junk, or the war (which they cover very poorly, no matter which side you're on). The best thing I've seen in a long time was CBS's recent series on where our tax dollars went, and just how many earmarks and pork there was last year. But this was one little 5 minute segment on the evening news. It wasn't longer. They didn't call for action. Just a quick "congress is wasting your tax dollars, oh well."
I remember once, a few years ago, Charlie Gibson did some little piece that was probably supposed to be fluff for Good Morning America. And in the middle of the piece he just asked this really insightful hardball question to the person. It made the Daily Show because it was such a perfect "gotcha" moment. And it just makes you wonder... Charlie seems like a nice guy but if he can do that kind of reporting, why is he just doing fluff on the morning show... competing with the likes of Regis and Kelly (who don't pretend to be news).
Every now and then, I'll hear a fantastic report on NPR. It will tell me more than I ever knew about some event that I'd already heard about earlier from other outlets; and I'll gain a real understanding. It may be just some little human interest type story, but something that's actually interesting about a little town or business and what's going on there. The "Grandma Smith's cat traveled 80 miles to come back home" type stories get, at most, a 5 second mention to fill time in a group of little tidbits.
And then, once in a long time, one of the reporters on Morning Edition will say something funny. Something I didn't expect, and hilarious. Not some bad joke anyone could have written. Not some forced line. Something that's actually funny. Like a few months ago when there was some story about Moree Eels, and they broke out into a version of "That's Amore" (which got posted in the comments here on /.) that made me just break out laughing. They're willing to take a few risks now and then that no TV network will.
To say nothing about their other programming. Where is network TV's version of All Things Considered, Science Friday, Talk of the Nation, or any of NPR's other news-type programs.
At this point, watching the main networks is just kind of depressing, making me pitty how bad they have become. You'll see people like Rather talk about trying to be Cronkite, and you just wonder how little Cronkite or some of those other older authoritative voices would think of how bad things are now.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
He's coming back, and I can't wait, but I think Stewart's version of straight news would be too depressing.
What I find so ironic is that this strike knocked my two main sources of news off TV, thus reducing the amount of coverage I've heard about it to what NPR did (which has died down now that the strike has been on for so long). A few weeks ago I realized I didn't even know if the strike was over or not and I had to go look it up.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Here in Australia, we have one network that is government funded and does not fall victim to any form of sensationalism.
The Australian Broadcasting Commission, ambiguously referred to as the ABC, is entirely funded by the government and therefore has no interest in ratings. The news and current affairs coverage is usually top-notch, although occasionally it demonstrates a slight left-wing bias.
I switch to Channel Ten, and I see Sandra Sully cutting to some recycled footage while talking about some cloning technology, and concluding the story with "Of course, human cloning is still many years away." Then, they use computer effects to duplicate Sandra Sully, and the two Sandras say in unison.. "or is it?".. followed by 15 minutes of someone rambling on about "Entertainment News", followed by a cut to the loud and annoying weatherman who spends more time advertising charities than talking about the weather, then cut back to Sandra Sully who will engage in some useless banter with the sport guy. And the sports report is just a veiled advertisement for the sports programme they have on later that night, and then they do some "Australian Idol" news, and finish up to pictures of the beach.
ABC is at least a safe haven of real journalism. I'm not even sure the people working at Channel Ten are even journalists.
I don't get my news from the Daily Show; it's just gratifying to hear someone on TV, pretending to report the news like they all do, who isn't lying to my face! Or pointing out when someone is lying! At least when they lie, it's clearly in the context of a joke!
And I always know, that if anyone on the TV is going to be the first to tell the truth about something, it's going to be the Daily Show. It's always the Daily Show. And that really pisses me off. I don't "watch it for the news". You can't get news from the TV anymore. And you talk to people who only get their news from the TV, like most people still do, and it's like being on another planet! They're completely brainwashed! Try to tell them what's going on, and it feels like you're screaming into the darkness!
I mean, I read this from the article:This isn't even true! I knew before the war, for example, that it was all premised on bullshit, maybe because I had an Internet connection? I forget how I knew; I just remember knowing a long time. I knew for at least a year beforehand. What am I, Nostradamus? I knew for at least a year that these people on TV were staring straight at us, carefully omitting things about Iraq that were true, saying things about it that weren't true, i.e. lying! How can they not know they're lying? I know they're lying! Lots of us knew they were lying! Lewis Black from the Daily Show knew they were lying! "I knew they didn't have weapons of mass destruction. How did I know that? I was just sitting on my fuckin' couch!" And then they wonder and bellyache about young people "getting their news from the Daily Show"!
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