Americans tune out world, turn on TV gore [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Tue, Nov. 16, 2004

Americans tune out world, turn on TV gore

LAURA BILLINGS

America loves dead people.

On any given night on network television, you can usually watch a fictional character suffocate in a plastic bag, get her brains blown out, get buried alive in an underground explosion, or have his vital organs cut into wafer-thin slices by one of several forensic scientist hotties, who can talk in grim and reverential detail about all the harm that can come to a human body.No wonder when someone important dies in real life, it's not nearly as entertaining.

This is one of several lessons we can draw from the recent firing of a CBS news producer who overrode network policy by assuming that the 16 million or so Americans watching "CSI: NY'' last Wednesday night might be interested in knowing that Yasser Arafat had died.

You can see why someone might make that mistake. After all, we had an election recently in which voters claimed that concern about terrorism was one of the central issues that had driven them to the polls. Arafat, who actually happened to be a terrorist, not to mention a Nobel Prize winner, certainly seemed like the kind of complex character Americans would want to know more about, and whose death might be worth considering for at least five minutes before the local news.

Unfortunately, Arafat's passing was not nearly as compelling as the restaurant employees killed in a multiple homicide on that night's episode, or the fun little subplot about the amputee found dead in his bed.Irate viewers called to complain. CBS apologized. And the producer, referred to as "overly aggressive," is now looking for other opportunities.

Perhaps this producer was unaware that a Pew Research Center study in 2002 found that only 48 percent of Americans could correctly identify Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader, after the four decades his name had been in the news. Of course, it could be worse. Fewer than three in 10 Americans could correctly identify Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, even though he's been in the public eye almost as long.
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http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/local/10190971.htm
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