Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Concerning "The News"
I have digital cable television... over 200 channels of mostly worthless garbage. As I surf channels I will almost always stop on anything that is listed (in the channel guide) as "news".
Today I stopped on a local channel's nightly news program to see what was on it and they were interviewing an actress about the happenings on a sitcom (I presume a sitcom hosted by the same network). What in the world does that have to do with news?
This is just one example of a much larger, systemic issue. The "news" doesn't really exist anymore.
Here we have a day filled with things that are newsworthy. From around the world there are things such as China will no longer keep natural disaster death tolls secret, Israeli troops leave Gaza, and Iran says they are continuing their nuclear research and development. Here in the U.S. we have Michael Brown resigning from FEMA, Bush saying he'll accept responsibility for any problems with response to Hurricane Katrina, and the confirmation hearings for a new Supreme Court Justice starting. Locally there are things such as City council endorses proposal for casino, Outside Auditors to be brought into city schools, Residents plead with city to limit pain of planned budget cuts. Yet, through all this, the "news" wants to tell me about a sitcom.
This isn't limited to television either, but television seems to be the worst about it. You would think that with only a half-hour or an hour to cram in all the happenings in the world, country, state, and locality that the television news would avoid fluff, but just the opposite seems to be the case.
Radio follows a close second to television with being near useless as a news source. There are two things that help to redeem radio; 1. they have traffic and weather reports while you are actually out in it, and 2. they have talk radio which actually helps to bring some real important issues up (though you have to switch between the conservative and the liberal stations to get any kind of objectivity on a subject). Since most of us either don't want to switch stations constantly or don't want to be outraged further (the other drivers are usually outrage enough) this means we generally only get one very slanted view or we don't get anything of use other than traffic and weather from the radio.
Newspaper is still the best source for news but it still tends to go for fluff over substance. How many times have you seen the headline be something about a sports team when you know something larger than sports is happening in the world? How about headlines about celebrities? Bahh... it all irritates me to no end.
There are three trends in "the news" that really annoy me:
Fluff - The "news" reporting on things that have absolutely no impact on my life such as the afformentioned sitcom. Also in this category would be things like celebrities, I don't care who got a DUI or who is in court... it doesn't impact my life. The piece about what barbeque grills are the hottest thing for this summer is useless to most of us, and those who do want to know can check out Consumer Reports magazine or website. The "news" is chalk full of useless fluff.
Sensationalism - Sensationalism means that the audience will want to hear it even if it has no impact on their lives. Sensationalism also means making the story appear bigger than it really is. Some of the afformentioned fluff is done because it is sensational as does the reporting on themselves that I will mention next, but this is much bigger than just those. How has the hanta virus, west nile virus, or mad cow disease impacted your life? How has the touching story of the family that survived a tornado (the family you've never met, of course) impacted your life? For the vast majority of us, it hasn't. The "news", however, would have you believe that your life is in immenent danger from all manner of things, they sensationalize it. This tends to desensitize us to real danger warnings. The "news" reports the sensational because it sells, not because it is of any real use to you.
Self Agrandizement - I don't want to hear one reporter interview another reporter about what a third reporter said (yes, I've actually seen this). You are the reporters, you are not the news! This is a growing trend in the "news industry" and it is, of all of these trends, perhaps the most damaging. The companies that put these "news" programs on the air don't want to fork over the money for any real investigation or reporting so reporting on themselves has become a cheap means of putting something that "sounds" newsworthy on the air without any real substance of "news". The reason this trend is so disturbing is that if it continues to grow at the rate that it has for the last few years soon we'll see nothing but opinion on the air. One reporting reporting (or debating) the opinion of another.
Humorously the right wing/conservatives/republicans continually say that the news media is biased toward the left while the left wing/liberals/democrats argue that the news media is biased toward the right. The truth of the matter is that the mainstream "news", with the exception of Fox News Channel (which is self-admittedly right-wing), neither is true. They are biased toward money. What makes them the most money is that which costs them nothing to research but will draw viewers and hence advertisers. That is what the media is biased to.
It seems the only place you get any actual "news" anymore is the internet. Funny how reporters criticize "internet research". Of course, even to get news there you have to use multiple sources and quite often still have to sift through a lot of garbage.
Myself, I have set up my homepage to show me RSS feeds of the top 5 most viewed stories from the websites of CNN, USA Today, BBC News, CBC News (Canada), ABC News (Australia), and, though the RSS feed doesn't work most of the time, even from Al Jazeerah.
Thank goodness for the internet, without it we'd be in the dark ages when it comes to knowing what is going on around us. I hope the "news media" wakes up and starts moving back toward real research and real stories.
