[Infowarrior] - More on....TV news observations

[Richard Forno]

Assorted responses....

> There have been two events in living memory where I swear you could
> watch reporters actively harassing participants to get more drama out of
> the situation.  The first was the opening of Gulf War II, where I heard
> the reports on CNN salivating over "shock and awe" and asking generals
> when they were going to see the "shock and awe".  Similarly, during the
> interregnum between John Paul II's death and the installation of the new
> Pope, you had the spectacle of reporters running up against the
> Vatican's propensity to not saying anything.  At all.
> 
> I don't have my copy handy, but the most prophetic book I've found on
> news reporting in general is Daniel Boorstin's "The Image".  He write
> this around Kennedy's time, but his concept of pseudo-events, and how
> the news media mostly deals with and generates pseudo-events is a very
> good description of the problem.  In particular, he describes two ways
> of reading a newspaper that doesn't report much: in one version, the
> reader says "not much happened today", in the other, the ready says
> "well, that's an uninteresting newspaper".  With...5(?) television news
> channels, I assume that all of them are operating in the latter model.

Call me cynical.

Personally, I think "Breaking News" is a statement made before a short
statement of fact which leads to a word (or 2 or 3 or 4) by our sponsors.

"Breaking News" keeps you from leaving the commercials which are interrupted
by statements of facts.

As to attracting more viewers, I doubt it.  Most people already have their
favorite source.  And with the speed of communications, most stories are
probably less than an hour away by an unknowing news group who will use a
local stringer as their on-scene reporter, for a fee of course.

> dude, most intelligent people have written off the drive-by er, main
> stream media as a bunch of irrelevant wankers by now. why do you pay
> any attention to them? let them slide into the oblivion they so richly
> deserve.
> 
> and yes, "breaking news" is their desperate attempt at screaming "look
> at me! I'm still relevant." in the face of the masses dismissing the
> stations themselves and their models as has beens. nobody benefits from
> video news really. what matters shows up in print (NY Times fiction and
> treason aside)

It's only the latest in a long series of tactics.  The ubiquitous crawl
(initiated on 9/11), "busy backgrounds" (often including flag-waving),
theme music, event titling ("crisis in FOO"), frantically-paced "interviews"
that are really just a platform for anchors to spout their points of
view, point-countpoint confrontations that are the antithesis of reasoned
discussion, simulations/projections of actual events, tech gimmicks
(like the "Situation Room" on CNN)...it's all about maximizing revenue
by pandering to as many idiots as possible.

If you've not seen "Network", this would be an excellent time to do so.

> During this tragedy I've been switching between CNN and Fox (with a
> smattering of the mostly pathetic wannabe's like MSNBC since they're
> between CNN and FOX on my cable lineup).
> 
> CNN is definitely abusing the "Breaking News" term. Fox seems to be
> respecting it to a certain degree (they'll use it to announce the
> imminence of a press conference by Condaleeza Rice, for example). CNN
> will use it in the manner of "stay tuned - we'll have this after the
> commercials" as previously noted. In that sense, perhaps they slyly
> define "breaking" as "after the break".
> 
> CNN is usually better for raw footage, and Fox for political analysis.
> Fox is getting big names for in-depth call-in segments for some reason
> (Bolton, various Israeli ambassadors). CNN gets some but not as many as
> Fox. Fox is particularly bad with their consulting military analysis
> though - I find it difficult to care what a retired O5 and O6 who last
> served in Vietnam have to say (my dad's a retired O6 so I mean no
> disrespect to the rank, and for the record HE doesn't care about what
> they say; he has his own non-news sources that are much more accurate
> anyway).
> 
> I'm amazed that even the usual blatantly anti-Israeli CNN reporters
> (e.g., Amanpour) are restraining their anti-Israeli tendencies this time
> around. Of course, Amanpour has a special place in my heart for once
> making then-president Clinton lose his temper and reveal that he was
> cognitively disabled (when his pre-programmed script could not handle
> her very simple question).

One of the aspects that I think applies here is that we have so overused
superlatives and attention grabbing phrases such as "Breaking News" in our
world today that I think people are likely not to pay attention unless some
such phrase is used.

This is epitomized for me by a sign recently posted by our small local
volunteer fire department in front of their fire engine garage door:
"Absolutely No Parking".  Simply "No Parking" should suffice in front of an
obvious fire department fire engine door.  My supposition is that they had a
plain "No Parking" sign and found that it was ignored.

We are overwhelming ourselves with information.  The challenge is to get one
to pay attention to some particular information. To achieve this the media
or others resort to sensational phrases, sounds, video.

It would be refreshing to have a news program that only used "Breaking News"
when they had an item that was unexpected and judged to have significant
ramifications for their listening/viewing audience.

> I think that the "Breaking News" mantra is at least as much about trying
> to convince the viewer that the news source in question is "ahead" of
> the others as it is about getting eyeballs on that particular story.
> It's both "There's something new worth watching" and "We got it FIRST!"
> - neither of which may be true.
> 
> If I may be allowed a rather disconnected observation, there are many
> aspects of today's culture that bring to mind the stereotypical
> impression one often reads or sees of Victorian times (which may not be
> historically accurate). The increasing "polite" conservatism, with an
> underbelly of truly creative depravity, increased religiosity, the
> highlight on public morality, the image of the major power (England
> then, America now) as needing to "save" the rest of the world from
> itself, highly hyperbolic advertising and prose, and so forth. It all
> seems so stylized.