“Discourse on virtue and they pass you by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy and you’ve got yourself an audience.” (Diogenes) - from the Jack’s Winning Words Blog. Jack went on to opine that – “People are more interested in being entertained than they are in being enlightened.”
I often grumble about the content of today’s so-called “news” shows on TV these days. If you take the commercials out there only about 22-24 minutes of actual air time left for the news in each 1/2 hour segment. In today’s newscasts there seems to be about 8-10 minutes of content that could reasonably be called actual news and the rest is either self-promotions or what I call “fluff news” – feel good pieces designed to provide an up-beat segment at the end of the broadcast.
I suppose that television is and always was an entertainment medium; so it should come as no great surprise that the so-called news shows have tended towards becoming just another entertainment segment in the daily schedule. Still, I recall in the heydays of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and other old-timers of the news-casting world that the content seemed to be meatier – or at least it seems that way in my memories of them.
It is particularly annoying when the local news personalities (they aren’t really news reporters any more) spend the bulk of the newscast promoting some upcoming event that they are to be a part of or to host. Locally, I happen to watch WDIV, and it was “news” of such importance that it consumed quite a bit of the half hour recently when the news team “reported” on their plans for the Thanksgiving Day parade. The same happens for the annual Fourth of July Fireworks and other significantt events that the WDIV news crew is tapped to host. And heaven help us around the time for the Detroit Auto Show, when the “news” is mainly about the show and the WDIV crew even shifts to the Cobo Hall show venue, so that they can better promote their own coverage of the event.
All of the local network news personalities do the same thing, since their upcoming appearances are apparently of such newsworthiness that it deserves to displace other, real news of the day. A cyclone in India, a mass killing in some other state – never mind that, “I’m going to be hosting the parade TV show tomorrow.” Even the local weatherperson gets in on the act these days, since most have become more identified as personalities than as meteorologists.
I suppose that, with newspapers having basically died and TV having turned it’s news coverage into an entertainment segment; we are left with the Internet as our primary source for real news coverage. The danger there is that some much of what is passed off as Internet news coverage occurs on Blogs from around the world and that means that the coverage is subject to interpretation and coloring by the blogger (of course the same could be said about the so-called network news shows). In many closed societies that may be the only source available to the outside world.
So, we are left with “news” shows with all of the heft of Entertainment Tonight. Even the network newscasts can’t seem to sustain broadcasts with more than 3-4 stories of real hard news content before they provide their “featured stories” of the night – the feel-good pieces that might have been on segments of 20-20 or 60 Minutes in times past. Those stories are easier to produce ahead of time than trying to cover real, breaking news and that likely has something to do with it.
Perhaps the ultimate cross-over show would be a TV Reality show about a local station news team in which they actually go on the air and present the newscast of the day; but, they also show all of the back-stage fun and games that go into producing that half hour of entertainment. I watch very little TV these days, so I could get my entire TV fix for the day wrapped up in that one show. Think of the drama and the humor and the action and interplay of the characters; and, oh yeah, a little of that news stuff, too.
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