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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 30, 2006
TV news
I was once told by a newspaper editor -- an editor I respected, by the way -- what to do in Cairo should rioting make it inadvisable to walk the streets. In that case, I was to return immediately to my hotel room, and flick on the TV. “Find out what’s happening from the TV news, and write around it.”Fortunately, the trouble didn’t materialize, and I was not reduced to writing only what my readers would already know, nor the temptation to make something up for variety. This editor’s remark was made years ago, and did contain a speck of drollness. I suppose it could be revised for this age of “interactive”. Yet there is hardly a newsroom I have visited without at least one TV suspended from the ceiling, nor an airport departure lounge, nor a public bar, nor downtown magazine rack, nor hotel lobby, nor hospital waiting room. A news channel is usually selected, and in any of these places it will be CNN by default. Indeed, when reporters on the U.S. President’s Air Force One found Fox News playing on the cabin screens, they were profoundly upset, and bombarded the White House spokesman with their complaints at the next press conference. Fox News, one of the journalists argued, was “biased”. Another said it was “not to his taste”. It is inconceivable either would have complained, had he remained attached to his CNN drip-feed. What I found most remarkable in my old editor’s suggestion, was the notion that TV reported raw news. There are unusual moments when this happens, against the very long odds that a TV crew will find itself in just the right location at the right time, and all have survived. There are near misses when a crew hustles to a location where news recently happened. But otherwise, TV coverage is by its nature the most meticulously edited and managed source of information in the public sphere. What may not even have begun as real news, is whittled down to repetitive videoclips and soundbites. Moreover, the medium relies, to keep its huge audiences, on a form of hypnosis to which the repetition contributes. Look at the eyes of a TV-watcher, and compare them to the eyes of a person reading. The former are glazed, and the face around them is often as free from any reactive expression as a corpse would be, in the same chair. While the New York Times continues to be the “party ideologist” for what I call the “gliberalism” of the mainstream media -- I think CNN is the principal disseminator. Fox commands a larger actual audience, but as the anecdote above suggested, few journalists will be caught dead watching it. There is an element of class prejudice in this, for Fox is watched in the Red States of America. The idea that anyone living outside a large metropolitan area must be a hick, is itself among the received views. This, anyway, is “what I understand”, mostly from reading, for as I am about to admit, I seldom watch television news myself, on any channel, and for the plausible reason I don’t own a TV. I do consult the various networks’ websites, less for news than to find out how the news is being shaped for the mass market -- what the “memes” are for today. I get the news itself much earlier, from a variety of websites and email connexions. But I wouldn’t be so enterprising if, given my dayjob, I didn’t have a need to know. Television, in my own received opinion, which exhibits my own class prejudice, is for people who don’t need to know, and don’t mind being manipulated. I would not go so far, however, as to dismiss the judgement of the general public. For if TV had manipulated people successfully, neither George W. Bush nor Stephen J. Harper would ever have been elected. On the other hand, I see no indication of a huge swing to the right since Fox went from a little tease on CNN’s right flank, to the larger network. It simply reflected the views of more people. Any media tycoon, in my opinion, could enjoy a similar success, if he faced down received, gliberal opinion and launched a parallel enterprise in print or elsewhere. And also, without much altering public opinion. In the long run, television isn’t the problem. It is the most visible symptom of a problem that lies much deeper, in a growing general detachment from reality. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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