To dumb to relay the news?
Bookworm on May 15 2008 at 6:42 am | Filed under: Media matters
What’s becoming increasingly scary about reporting — or maybe it was always a problem and, without the internet, we just didn’t know it — is the media’s abysmal ignorance. Here is yet another example of the pathetic idiocy of those who relay news to the world.
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…as the LA Times ratings continue their plunge.
For another example of how fatally diseased the MSM is:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24635229#24635229
Dumb? Yes. But that does not seem to stop most reporters from having a mission to get like-minded people into power.
Scott Johnson over at PowerLine has a post today on Obama’s recent statement that the U.S. is having trouble in Afghanistan because our military’s Arabic translators are all tied down in Iraq and can’t be shifted to Afghanistan.
Apparently, Obama forgot that Farsi, Pashtu and Dari are spoken in Afghanistan, not Arabic.
Now if Bush, Cheney, or a conservative had said something like that, the reporters, who swear they are objective, would have been all over it, ensuring wall-to-wall, 24 hour coverage of the incident and mocking Bush (or whoever) for their ignorance. But “The Annointed One” said it and most reporters are not about to draw any attention to Obama’s “misstatement.”
And yet we are supposed to take these reporters and their opinions seriously - even when they are so transparently liberal and so unfamiliar with the American military that they can’t even tell whether a soldier in a photo has on an American uniform.
It’s no wonder more and more people are getting their news from non-MSM sources.
After a couple of decades at NBC, I can tell you - at least for TV - “smart”comes in a long way behind a good Q score; the camera loves him/her; he/she looks authoritative; the mike loves the voice; is a wonderful clothes horse and looks superb in a $1,000 Armani suit; blue eyes are a must; skin tone works well with make-up and the lights (he/she doesn’t come out orange when lit); can read the crawl without squinting; and is bright enough not to wear checked shirts and striped ties or scarves that will strobe on camera on those occasions when the dressers and make-up people are too busy to watch out for it.
You didn’t think Walter Cronkite made it through college, did you? (On his own, I mean, pre- the honorary degrees.)
Not that I am disputing the MSM’s lack of intelligence, but I think these errors are caused mainly by laziness.
Okay - now, in the interests of fair and balanced, there is a tiny bit of an excuse for some of it, and again: TV.
When Ronald Reagan deregulated everything in sight, he should, perhaps, not have done so with the media. A lot of rules like “you can’t own a TV station and a newspaper in the same market” went away, and the FCC was reduced to pretty much nothing. You were no longer in actual danger of losing your license if you screwed up the news, or spouted obscenities, or really much of anything. It became toothless. (You had to do the news in a more or less reasonable manner, because you only got a license to use the airwaves in the first place based on the idea that you’d be a disseminator of accurate information. News was, in other words, a condition of the license to broadcast.)
However, that, though it still exists on paper, is in practice pretty much a ghost.
The obligation to do it decently disappeared, and news stopped being a public service and became just another profit center.
And the networks all got sold. Cap Cities bought ABC; Larry Tisch bought CBS, and GE bought NBC. They were all interested in profit, and not much interested at all in public service. Larry Tisch, a bottom line guy, is famous for saying; “Let’s not do news on CBS any more at all. It just loses tons of money, can’t we get rid of it altogether?” He ultimately concluded that the network was never going to make money, and dumped it as quick as he could, thus Viacom owns it.
Jack Welch was nothing if not a bottom line guy with NBC, and Cap Cities and ABC got swept up by Disney.
Now, it’s still there in the license, sort of, so you can’t get rid of it, so what do you do? You stop throwing money at it, and you start cutting. At NBC, five minutes after they got there (in fact the sale was already done on paper before they took over) the NBC Radio Network vanished. Next, the overseas bureaus were all closed up. Why are we paying people to sit around in every major city on the planet, when we can buy local coverage as needed?
And then, all the staffs in New York began to be cut. The first to go was all the people who sat in the library all day. “What the hell are these people doing sitting around drinking coffee all day?” What they were doing was known as “fact-checking,” and their job was to stop egregious errors from making it on air. At all three networks, they’re all gone, baby - so a lot of stupidity goes out. We show film of L-1011s in stories about DC-10s - what the hell, they both have three engines, why not? The wire services, also feeling a crunch, did the same thing. Twenty years ago that photograph that spawned this thread would have been caught - somebody would have said: “so why are we planning to run a picture of an Israeli soldier with this story?” and it wouldn’t have gone out. But these days, that guy is not there, so out it goes.
And that’s a big part of it. The anchors are cement-heads hired because they look good and work well with lights, make-up, camera, etc. and brains are a long way down the list; but the important part is that the people who routinely saved them from bouts of egregious dimwittery and kept the balls in the air aren’t there any more.
It became a business, not a service. And every year they were told things like; “you have ten people in this department. Dump two of them.” And next year it was: “see? You could do it with eight. Dump two more.” And in a couple of years there was one guy left, who ended by being so beaten-down he decided the hell with it, and ceased caring. Even salmon can only swim upstream for just so long.
Nobody’s looking over anybody’s shoulder any more, and they often end up looking even dumber than they are. (And they are pretty dumb. Smartness is not a criteria.)
And network news departments still, it should be noted, aren’t making money.
Wow, jj. I think I’m going to copy, paste and keep that. If what you say is true (and I have no experience or information to say it isn’t), that’s pretty sad. Do you see any solutions possible? (Other than someone with _lots_ of money and a desire to see it done right no matter what it costs?)
No - those days are gone. When the networks started out as radio networks, pre-TV, they were obligated to do news. It was always a loser in financial terms, so the only thing they could get out of it was reputation. They had to do it, no matter what it cost, so they actively tried to do a good job and took a lot of pride in it.
Then deregulation came along, the networks all went on the block within a year or two of each other and found themselves being run by businessmen, not broadcasters. The bottom line became the whole story, and if you couldn’t make money with news, you could at least try to lose as little as possible.
Another major issue at the time was that cable was starting up in a big way. To encourage cable’s market penetration, they gave the cable providers all kinds of breaks, waivers, and exemptions from rules. That made an unlevel playing field: the networks had all kinds of rules they had to adhere to (sort of) - and cable could get away with running X-rated movies. That made the fiscal squeeze on a news department that was a perennial loser even tighter. And, like everything else with the government, once started it doesn’t stop: cable still enjoys exemptions, waivers, etc. Seems to me they’ve penetrated the market pretty effectively, but the breaks continue, and the playing field remains unlevel.
The biggest one, of course, is that, as originally envisioned, cable was going to earn its revenue from charging people to receive it - no commercials. Well, it was successfully argued that it took a huge captal investment to string all that wire and stuff, so cable sought and got a waiver on that one, too: they charge you for hooking up, charge you to rent the box, AND get revenue from running commercials.
And, of course, that one continues to this day, too. (Satellite systems got fed in during the late eighties with all the same breaks as cable.)
So the networks are getting creamed, all they get is revenue from commercials, so they’re constantly looking for ways to cut the budget. News is an easy one. And it’s quite plainly apparent in the quality of the work.
Sometimes this is funny, as in the case of “gravitas” when Bush chose Cheney to be VP. How many times in your life had you heard the word “gravitas” used in conversation before that - and then all of a sudden for three days you heard it everywhere, from everybody on the news. You couldn’t escape it. Why? Because not one of those stories that Rather, Brokaw, Jennings - or anyone else did - was written in house. Some clown at the AP wrote it, and the rest of the world just ripped it off the wire and read it on the air. It made them sound like idiots of course, but it was the clearest indication you could have that there was no writing, no checking, no nothing going on in-house: just wire ripping.
On the entertainment side, it’s also why you see so many “reality” shows today: they cost about eighty-nine cents to produce. They’re garbage of course, but boy are they cheap! That’s all that counts.
One of the interesting thing about seeing reporters at protests is it’s become clear that most of them aren’t exactly bright and then of course you see their story which has almost no connection with the actual events. They’re also lazy and/or rushed - they’ll stay for a minute or two of the speech to get a good quote and then just leave, missing the good stuff.