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)."
Journalism and Journalism Majors (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yeah, read this yesterday (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Re:Who the hell is (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
There is some hope in Australia (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Watch Network, read Shock Doctrine. (Score:1, Interesting)
After you have experienced those works things like Trent Lott's recent retirement make completely repugnant sense and it will be much easier to understand what is not being reported and why.
There Is No Audience (Score:4, Interesting)
Those stats are from 2006. After another year, that probably means there's only 25M or fewer viewers. Half the number from 1982. But the rates are much faster than they inummerately describe (they watcht too much TV to be good at math). 1M of 25M is a 4% drop in 2006; the 1M drop in 1983 was a 2% drop. And since the US population was about 230M in 1982, but 300M now, we're talking about a drop from about 22% to about 8% of the population tuning in. Which is a drop to almost one third, in case you're wondering.
That one third still watching TV is probably mostly the same people as a quarter century ago, now glued to sets in their nursing homes, unable to change the channel. And the stats don't even address the number of people who now don't just mainline the nightly news as the gospel truth, but also cross-reference with the Internet, including actually discussing the news on blogs.
The news has never been a good business for the broadcasters. It was just jammed into their commercial offerings to justify their use of the public airwaves and all kinds of other subsidies they get, and to make the rest of the "messages" (advertisements and the propaganda disguised as "news") more respectable. The rest of their programming makes more money in the ads that's their only real product. So they'll be glad to call it quits once no one is interested in holding them to any kind of "public service" any more.
As soon as about an hour or so of actual news is clickable YouTube on my bigscreen TV that my friends have all recommended, I'll be happy to let them get away with finally just canceling their shabby efforts.
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:2, Interesting)
Cobain created a genre and heavily influenced nearly every musician to play a guitar since. Britney danced badly for a few years, then got fat.
You tell me which is more worthy of a headline.
Re:What's wrong with TV news? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Big Media a Political Tool (Score:3, Interesting)
If your complaint is that our TV coverage is opinionated, then I've got news for you: it's always been that way. Newspapers have long held biases.
The difference is that newspapers are doing it with their presses, not my air waves. We let tv stations make billions every year because they are in part suppose to promote the public good. They used to held to a standard where they would be audited for such things every three years. Now they literally send in a license renewal by postcard once every 8 years and no one ever loses their license.
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:5, Interesting)
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!" [youtube.com] And then they wonder and bellyache about young people "getting their news from the Daily Show"!
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:3, Interesting)
- RG>
Re:Hate to respond to my own post, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Might I recommend highly the Newshour with Jim Lehrer to all readers?
The Newshour is decent only relative to competition. True, they are willing to devote 15 or 20 minutes to a topic and don't yell over each other. However, they rarely ask tough questions and never force tough answers. Politicians know it is a safe place to spin.
If you look at the composition of guests on the Newshour your realize they are as bad as anyone else, just better behaved. The "experts" tend to be from the usual corporate funded think tanks. If anything, being in DC, it is worst than most shows in booking the standard power elite stooges. You can count on one hand the number of guests who might actually rock the boat or say something outside the Washington defined limits of the topic.
Re:What's wrong with TV news? (Score:2, Interesting)
So why should they go out of their way to court me? I've quite literally removed myself from the market.
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the show's memory regarding public statements, that used to be called Journalism. I think the only thing funnier than the show itself is the media reaction to it. The "real" journalists you see participating in the show do so because they like what he is doing, and can see the irony of a show that presents heavy editorial comment framed by humor in order to reach an audience that the major news networks have effectively lost.
It works. South Park and The Daily Show (after Stuart took it over) were the two main things that made Comedy Central grow and evolve, while it's siblings (the other comedy-based networks that few notice anymore) utterly failed. The History Channel became the Aliens and Biblical Prophecy Channel, The Discovery Channel became the Sharks, Blood, and Disasters Channel, and the Learning Channel, so promising at first, has effectively become the authoritative source of Medical Freaks and Wedding Planning. Meanwhile the Comedy Channel has gone from a dirt-broke cable backwater that mostly featured stand-up comedians in comedy clubs, old sitcoms, and a few forgettable homebrew series... to an utterly foul-mouthed travesty of toilet humor, sex humor, and tragedy humor dominated by high production values, social commentary disguised as comedy, a whole mess of puerile garbage with too many saving graces to be ignored, and some of the most controversial, hilarious, foul, and intelligent programming currently on television.
Saturday Night Live, at it's height, was usually just very very funny. In Living Color had some serious intelligence that slowly collapsed under it's own ghetto-targeted humor. Mad TV dabbled in commentary, but was mostly just shock humor. Meanwhile, the first decade of the 21st century has seen a network that rallies under the banner of the First Amendment in a way rarely seen. They really are the court jesters of this country (and beyond).
Incidentally, I have a running bet going with a few people that, very shortly after leaving office, if the show still stands, Bush will finally make an appearance on The Daily Show. He's had every other living president (sometimes more than once), and even the sitting VP's wife, so it's a fair chance.
Re:What's wrong with TV news? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the downfall of politics and just about everything else, nobody (on average) really cares about stuff they have to go out and expend energy for. Reading is 'work', looking at pictures is 'entertainment', and entertainment seems to be all you can get from the tube. If you want information, the internet fortunately gives you an infinite number of channels so that at least for people that want information there now are avenues other than the local library (which can be closed, on the other side of town or simply too small).
Before '96 I spent a fortune on books, now I can read all I want. The Internet is TV's antidote. Sure it has the same BS on it that TV had, but it has so much more. More good information on any subject that you care enough about to do a little bit of research.
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's wrong with TV news? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's the problem with the theory that its the audience's fault. First, take that all potential audience members fall into one of these three groups:
Then factor in that it is much, much, cheaper to air infotainment over hard news, and you will realize that group one would have to be significantly bigger than 2 and 3 combined for it to make economical sense to air real news.
You can argue that if a market existed for 1, someone would produce it. But such an argument is ignorant of the current cicumstances in tv. Just like in other media, tv execs are terrified of the risks that are associated with their business, and anytime they can reduce that risk they do. Infotainment has become the safe thing, and so for now, few would risk making their news show anything else.
Re:Reuters? The BBC? Unbiased? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You hit a pet peeve of mine there (Score:2, Interesting)
Britney Spears definintely has a phonetic set. Her singing isn't bad either.
Seriously, to see what people care about compare real news websites to celebrity gossip sites - the latter beats the former by several orders of magnitude, and most gossip sites get more comments than /. articles
It's quite clear what kind of news people want, and nothing short of censorship will slow the flow of drivel that pretends to be news.
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:3, Interesting)
The point is that these contradictions are ignored by the mainstream media.
Fact: Before 9/11 Rudy Giuliani was a supporter of and fundraiser for a terrorist organization.
This isn't hypothesis or inference. Giuliani attended numerous IRA fundraising events and these were reported in the New York Times at the time [blogcritics.org]. Giuliani attended the events to be reported. I don't think that Giuliani ever seriously supported the methods of the IRA but he was willing to at least pretend that he did in order to court the NYC Irish vote.
The IRA caused more deaths than Al Qaeda has to date.
Giuliani even gave Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA a 'humanitarian' award. A few months later Gerry and his boys bombed a shopping mall. Rudy never condemned the attack on civilians. Not good for his votes you see. Bin Laden is probably asking himself 'hey where is my Crystal Apple'.
Giuliani has set himself up as an expert on terrorism. He has attacked Islamic 'charities' that are in fact funraising fronts for organizations such as Hamas and Al Qaeda. Yet nobody seems to have challenged his efforts to raise funds for NORAID, the IRA's US fundraising arm.
It isn't just a matter of one man's terrorist being another's freedom fighter. It is also a question of what the best way to fight terror actually is. The IRA had several ceasefires before 9/11 but it was when the US funraising line was severed that they were finaly forced to pack it in. When I first came to Boston pretty much every irish themed pub would have a NORAID fundraiser advertised. Every single one of the posters disappeared within days of 9/11.
Giuliani is currently trying to relaunch his campaign on the back of the assasination of Bhutto, another round of bad anti-terrorist proposals, I blogged on the idiocy of his proposal for cyber-warfare against AQ yesterday [blogspot.com]. There are two ways to fight terrorism, the way the British responded to the IRA in the 1970s and the way the West Germans responded to Baader-Meinhof. The British used the tactics of torture and internment (sound familiar) which only made the situation worse. The IRA gained supporters worldwide, including US appologists like Giuliani himself. the West German approach of using police powers and absolutely refusing to recognize terrorists as political prisoners did work. That is why the British switched to the west German tactics and why the US should do the same against Al Qaeda. But this whole debate is not one that the US establishment media will ever allow.
So why won't the establishment media ask Giuliani why he supported the terrorist organization that attempted to murder my family?
Its because it does not fit their script. According to the script Gore was a liar, Bush was dumb but good company and Giuliani is the fearless crusader against terrorism. No mention of course of the fact that he tried to make his mobbed-up partner DHS secretary and he positioned the emergency control room in the WTC complex so that it was in easy walking distance of city hall for his shag-fests with Judith and the rest of the harem. Those facts don't fit the script. They only get asked by the establishment media at all because Josh Marshall at TPM and the rest of the blogosphere have insisted on it.
Re:You hit a pet peeve of mine there (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Call Jon Stewart (Score:3, Interesting)
NB: I don't really give a shit about Cobain. This post is intended solely to explain why his suicide is "real" news.
1. Cobain was the frontman for an extremely influential rock group that, rightly or wrongly, was credited by many with revitalizing a stagnant music industry and birthing a new genre of music. Rightly or wrongly, the band was seen as the flagship for a generation of youth in a way that whoever the trendy socialite-of-the-month isn't.
2. A suicide is a rather more final, and newsworthy event than Paris or Britney or Nicole or Lohan has done so far. If Paris Hilton or Britney Spears were to kill herself, then I submit that *would* be a newsworthy death, and Cobain's suicide even moreso than that.
Re:You hit a pet peeve of mine there (Score:3, Interesting)
The U.S. government is at it's most anti-scientific it's even been. Bush has lackeys censoring and editing public science projects to make sure the results are only the pre-approved results. Of course, now these U.S. groups are helping to organize stupidity in the rest of the world too.
He's right you know (Score:3, Interesting)
I never had the opportunity to work directly with John as he worked the Dateline side and I was strictly on "news." I worked as an editor for NBC Nightly News and Today for over 8 years. You can see some of my work here [youtube.com]. Like John, I was laid off in one of their "downsizing" operations.
John writes in his article about how there was a lot of interest in finding stories in the emotional heart of America and no interest in stretching the understanding of most Americans and that is true of Dateline as well as the News division. John was a very well-known journalist hired by Dateline to do serious stories. He is right to have felt frustrated. There is zero interest in informing Americans what is truly happening and the best example is the 2000 election.
NBC breathlessly announced that there was a "Constitutional Crisis" in the election and that unless this whole Florida recount was figured out it would turn into a real crisis. Then NBC sent cameras to get unique angles of election officials scrutinizing punch-card ballots and followed the court cases. Then, rather than inform America about what is written in the US Constitution, NBC and the other networks passively stood by while the US Supreme Court, in a completely extra-Constitutional step decided to hear the case of Bush v Gore and then decided to select who would be the next President of the United States.
Americans' lack of understanding about their own Constitution was recently exemplified to me by a recently-retired naval Commander who told me that she thought that this Electoral College thing for choosing the President should be changed and that we should get our Congress to change it. I told her that our Constitution did not provide for the popular election of a President and that the States were in charge of that. The States choose how electors shall be chosen and most have a "Winner Takes All" approach but some apportion some electors according to how the popular vote went. I suggested that she ask her Governor and her State representatives to change how they chose their electors.
NBC never reported that, when the US Supreme Court got involved, it was taking away the right of the State of Florida to apportion its electors. The top court that should have decided in this case was the Florida Supreme Court and, if they didn't decide the case or if a recount would have taken too long, the matter would have been thrown to the US Congress to decide whether or not to accept any electors from Florida, to accept the electors from all states save Florida or to decide the matter themselves.
There was no crisis and NBC reporting that there was is another example of a story being sensationalized for ratings, which seems to be more important than NBC actually informing the viewers of the facts and what is really going on.
Furthermore, none of the blogs I read, nor any of the radio or television stations I watched actually informed the public as to the facts of the Constitution. I did read one book well after Bush v Gore was settled stating that what the Supreme Court did was extralegal. I noted that the New York Times did have a story about how Florida's Supreme Court had final say and then they ignored this fact as soon as the case was heard by the Supreme Court of the US.
So I think it's safe to say that everyone got the real story wrong.
I'm really happy to see that John has gainful employment. I'm still looking for something full-time