Read All About It: Television News Gets Away with Not Giving a Damn

December 6, 2007

By Randy Feldman


In 2007, I returned from a vacation in Turkey. I had last visited Istanbul 27 years ago as a 22-year-old backpacker. At that time it looked like a sleepy, Middle Eastern (non-Gulf), Muslim country. Not anymore. Now Istanbul looks like Europe. Its rapid development — as a Muslim country basically without oil — into a modern, organized, efficient country reminds one of other nations with rapid economic success stories: China, India and Brazil (none of which succeeds because of oil wealth).
What was also intriguing and inspiring (though it frustrated and depressed me for the United States) was the high quality of the newscasts. CNN-Middle East did not at all resemble CNN or "Headline News" in the U.S. The English version of Al Jazeera was as fine a newscast as I have witnessed. It resembled the BBC or CNN, before CNN dumbed down to compete with Fox News. CNN-Middle East and Al Jazeera were so good because they allow expert guests the time necessary to talk in more then 15-or 20-second sound bites, not just in the in-depth stories, but throughout the broadcast. This allowed a full airing of one's views and still gave the anchorperson enough time to compare and challenge one guest commentator's opinions with the opinions of other experts on the broadcast.
Important issues in the world — such as U.S. plans to build a missile shield over Europe against Russia's wishes; the U.S. and Western Europe's response to fears that Iran is acquiring nuclear capability; the Turkish response to the PKK Kurdish rebel attacks on it's soldiers; the debate about whether violence against Armenian people living in Turkey during the WWI years was a genocide; the return to Pakistan and attempted assassination of Benazir Bhutto; the European Union's strategy to enlist the U.S. to press China to increase the value of its controlled currency and open up it's own markets to the world, so that we do not keep sending our money and jobs to China; and the proposed meeting in Maryland of Palestinian and Israeli leaders to make peace — are all stories given paramount attention abroad.
When I returned to the U.S., our television news broadcast was about disciplinary action against two teachers acting too sexual for public taste, a car accident that caused a highway to shut down, the magician David Copperfield being accused of sexual assault in the Bahamas, other crimes and court cases covering individuals' poor behavior, the first day of the California fires (even before they became a national calamity), a North Carolina house fire killing college students within it and other topics that have not and will never shape the world to come, but which appeal to people's emotions, especially our fears. Our electronic news coverage has never been very good (other than when CNN first started) but it has never really been this bad.
I believe the recent downfall began with the challenge and then dominance of Fox news. I'm not speaking about its political orientation, I'm referring to how, in the Rupert Murdock tabloid newspaper tradition, it serves news in a way that allows people to easily feel emotional about what they are viewing, without evaluating the varying contemporary and historical perspectives and complexity that make analyzing and understanding an issue difficult. Murdock then added the short skirts and exposed legs of female anchors (taking away the anchor desk so that everyone could view their alluring legs), pretty faces (mostly) with blonde hair, and recently, exposed cleavage. Why? Same reason: different approach. Get viewers to experience an emotion, instead of reasoning through information presented from varying and often contrary perspectives, each having some truth and persuasiveness within it.
CNN eventually felt forced to imitate Fox to compete for ratings. I always wondered why station executives couldn't say to their shareholders: "We're commercial television in every other way except when it comes to the news. While presenting news we're informing the nation for the good of the nation. News is a small part of our big corporation. If you can't accept this, invest elsewhere. Our nation and democracy needs us to be responsible and informative."