NYT, Rich: "Happy Talk News Covers a War"

[DeepModem Mom]

FRANK RICH
Happy Talk News Covers a War

Published: July 18, 2004


....If each generation gets the Hollywood treatment of TV journalism that it deserves, then "Anchorman," however hit-and-miss its humor, is our "Network" and "Broadcast News." "Network" (1976) satirized a network news operation's willingness to offer any sensationalized spectacle, even an anchor's televised suicide, to win the ratings war. "Broadcast News" (1987) showed us how slick looks and telegenic charm can trump reporting talent and integrity as assets in the race to the top of TV news stardom. "Anchorman" grandfathers in the concerns of the other two but shows how the desperation of would-be news stars to create likable on-screen personas (to be a "newsonality," as The Washington Post critic Tom Shales labeled one pioneer of the breed, Kelly Lange of KNBC in Los Angeles, in 1977) can mean forsaking journalism entirely....

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In the now legendary White House press conference of March 6, 2003, not a single reporter, electronic or print, asked a tough question about anything, including the president's repeated conflating of 9/11 with the impending war on Iraq (eight times in that appearance alone). To some critics on the left, this Stepford Wives performance indicated a press corps full of conservatives, but I doubt it. This lock-step spectacle was at least in part an exercise of the Burgundy principle of pandering: don't do anything that might make you less popular with your customers. In that same month, Frank N. Magid Associates, still a major player in the news consulting business, released a survey telling its clients that war protests came in dead last of all topics tested among 6,400 viewers nationwide. In other words, if you're covering the news based on what's happening as opposed to what your viewers like, you're taking a commerical risk. Given that the ownership of local stations, networks and cable news alike is now concentrated in far fewer hands than it was in the 1970's, such thinking quickly becomes orthodoxy in much of the American news business.

In the new documentary "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," Robert Greenwald unearths some juicy documentation of Fox News Channel's manipulations on behalf of its political agenda. But Fox isn't exactly pursuing a stealth strategy: anyone who can't figure out that it's in the tank with the Republican party must be brain dead. It's more insidious when some of its more fair-and-balanced competitors blow-dry the news not to serve an ideology but to tell the public what they think the public wants to hear. That's why the networks have been reluctant to show casualties in Iraq. That's why we rarely see on American TV the candid video Michael Moore unveils in "Fahrenheit 9/11," whether of the president or of the grievously wounded, sometimes embittered soldiers who've returned from his mission in Iraq.

Even now, as the entire press, including The Times, copes with the reality that it wasn't skeptical enough about the administration's stated case for war, the desire to gladhand the public can overcome news judgment, especially on television. Otherwise Americans wouldn't have found it such a novelty when the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish network, took on Mr. Bush in a TV interview last month, challenging him repeatedly about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and his claim that the war in Iraq has made us safer. The RTE reporter, Carole Coleman, wasn't pretending to be any viewer's family or buddy or lover. "I felt I did my job," she said when American journalists questioned her about her audacity. Maybe so, but next to the Ron Burgundys in her profession (re. Will Ferrell's portrayal of Ron Burgundy in "Anchorman"), she seemed less like a visitor from a different country than an alien from a distant planet.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/arts/18RICH.html