I spent part of last week at a family resort in the Poconos — an old-school place, with a dining hall and shuffleboard and horseshoe tournaments — and on Tuesday morning, some dreadful news circulated around the swimming pool. At the local Shop-Rite, where someone had gone for provisions, everyone was talking about how George W. Bush had died. Had a massive heart attack while sleeping. Was discovered by his wife.
I turned to my iPhone, but couldn’t get a signal. So I went into the main lodge and flipped through cable news, expecting retrospectives and tributes and details. All I found were anchors discussing Tom Cruise’s divorce and watching tape of a judge in West Virginia, yelling at a litigant. Bush, it was clear, was alive and well.
Comments
"If your employees have to produce 12 to 24 hours of television every day, they can't do enough in-depth reporting to actually advance the stories." Of course they can! Most just choose not to. More time can and should mean more depth. Sure, some viewers want a 24/7 loop of news headlines interspersed with Hollywood gossip and results from DWTS or Idol. But others will sit and watch a 20 minute segment on national politics, one on international politics, and one on science, a la PBS.
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Only people that are really not interested in the news would fall victim to bogus news stories. Unfortunately, many of those people are voters, and can be manipulated with lies.
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One of the worse things about news today is the triumph of the column filler. Column fillers were odd, little stories that newspapers used to fill in odd spaces on their pages. Now those stories, which rarely have any importance whatsoever, get headlines of their own and are repeated and debated continuously on cable news. I enjoyed those stories when no one was paying attention to them or taking them seriously. Now that they are becoming the cornerstones of our culture I don't find them so amusing anymore.
No, the problem is the loss of not enough corroborative news reporting. Statements are taken and the scenarios are woven even before any facts have been carefully examined. I also notice that neither the NY Times or the Globe have significantly more pages than in the past. So the actual news volume is the same. It just feels like it is overwhelming because of more heat than light. As for network news, cable news, and talk radio it is a hash and rehashing many times of events that have not even happened yet, but they could the talking heads tell us. Sounds like Cheney's 1% philosophy. It has always been a difficult transition when media delivery changes but we'll work it out, hopefully for the better or maybe just try turning off the newsy part of tv programing or what pops up on your blackberry for a few days. When you come back little will have changed as the churning wheels of gossipy pundits are still trying to outdo each other. Pogo: "We have met the enemy and it is us."
Hmm...sounds like a lot of excuses to me. Lets' face it. Today's media-types are extremely weak writers and reporters. The more intelligent people are actually at The Onion.
This is a terrific piece and it's spot on. On the local level we see stories about basically nothing. And if nobody died today let's look back at the anniversary of somebody that died a year ago. So it's the body count vs. the teenagers who knocked over a few headstones. Who gives a crap? The reason that news became big business is that it costs the network nothing to air theses stories! In a sitcom the network must pay writers and actors and all other info Vex in a production. There are no story writers on the news. We give them the stories. It's all exaggerated and overblown because there's really only so much news that's fir to air.
I don't know how the news actors can endlessly repeat the same crap all day and night. No wonder they get paid so much, it would drive me insane. In the meantime, when I check BBC, I find there really were a few important things that happened somewhere in the world but not reported here. I do think cutting the "news" time allotted has a chance of restoring some relevance to the broadcasts. One key to viewer lack of interest I think is the excessive advertising. Keep advertising to 6 minutes per hour (10%) and perhaps we could stand to watch TV again.