What's Wrong With the TV News 536
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)."
Very very simple to answer... (Score:5, Informative)
And I'm not the only one who thinks this. There are papers about this very subject. [amazon.com]
Hate to respond to my own post, but... (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The trouble with TV (why print rules) (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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! (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two words! (Score:1, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] will help: 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 (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 [danwismar.com] (it's called Operation Mockingbird [wikipedia.org] 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?