Media Musings: Breaking news not always vital
Comedy Central’s satirist, Jon Stewart, is able to puncture the hypocrisy of the media and Washington better than most working that part of the street today. He and his writers hammer the hypocrisy that passes for public policy and a media he sees as totally compromised, outwitted by Washington spin doctors.
Stewart recently appeared on “NOW with Bill Moyers” and showed a serious, searing mind that said to Moyers that the press, whatever that is today, has been discovered. His point was aimed at cable news shows but it also applies to Nashville television news.
Driven by the ruthless pressures of competition to have the top ratings, MSNBC, CNN, and FOX News act as hungry wolves, always looking for breaking news. That discovery, by political handlers such as James Carville and Karl Rove, means if your situation looks troubled, you give these nets something new to use, to appear that, like the legendary wire services and tabloid press of an earlier time, you are the “first with breaking news.”
Moyers’ research indicated that CNN broke into its normal news flow to announce, yes, breaking news, that Martha Stewart had entered a courtroom and then he had some absurd number of times the same formula had worked.
So, too, is it true of local TV news. Nothing could be finer than to open the 10 p.m. rating war than to use “breaking news” for a lead story which tells us – hang on to your remote – that there is a fire in Nashville and we have sent a crew there to report to you live all about it. Of course, you learn later on that, while sad, no one was hurt and the fire department is investigating the cause. Wow.
Local TV is using a very old news definition that leaves newcomers to our world believing we shoot, kill, maim, and torch to the point Nashville, as one writer to The Tennessean aptly wrote, we now live in a terrorist-dominated nation. Hyperbole that is, but so too is the way news is done. There are dozens of important stories never assigned because the same talent and crews are chasing cops, robbers, and the fire department.
Cable and local TV news, therefore, are locked into such a competitive environment they are damaging the body politic, because, sadly, most of us get our “news” from TV.
Stewart said it bluntly and well, observing that Wall Street and Washington “figured out” the hot button for the channels and it feeds them constantly to divert them. In Stewart’s opinion, the nation knows nothing about Wall Street or Washington today because both mega-powers have built “walls” around themselves and feed the media junk news.
As Moyers complimented Stewart for the wit and wisdom of his work, Stewart said it was because of great writing by his staff and because there is so much material to use it’s really more difficult to pick what to use for each show. How true that is.
KUDOS: To Jim East, the veteran reporter/editor for The Franklin Review Appeal, for his story on the closing of Earl’s Fruit Stand, a fixture for 46 years in the community. East caught so well the importance of that place, where generations of children were taken to see his great pumpkins (some weighed nearly 1,000 pounds) during the fall season.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)