On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television The Shifting Shapes of TV News By Reuven Frank IMAGES have now dominated words for the better part of a century. For many, World War II lasted from Hitler slapping his...
...Sooner or later the three cable services will have to break out of what has become a dreary routine: a little news summary, a little argument, a small audience that doubles only when something big is happening...
...This, too, may have decided the election...
...This was a story you had to follow to be cool, to be conversant, to be a participant rather than a wallflower...
...If your taste does not run to Oprah or Everybody Loves Raymond, you may still feel you must keep watching as you wait for another shoe to drop...
...On its part, the network's news division now had a place to use everything and everybody, to set up a "farm team" and a training ground...
...When profits fall, accountants cut costs...
...In all media, accountants complain about the cost of sending journalists to report on what later turns out not to have been newsworthy...
...Those were photographs...
...More important, they felt they were actually part of what was going on...
...But that is how they stayed with the story...
...Traditionalnetworknews.meanwhile, is increasingly being challenged...
...Although that image was also caught in a photograph reproduced in most American newspapers and on the cover of one magazine, as well as videotaped for use by every network newscast, it was as a live picture on the 24/7 cable news channels (news seven days a week, 24 hours a day) that it registered deepest...
...Some of its faces—Christiane Amanpour, Larry King, Bernard Shaw—became stars...
...Newsday said all-news cable "came of age" during those five weeks...
...Like CNN, it does not have any strong editorial viewpoint...
...Despite their problems, the all-news cable channels are the obvious candidate, by default if nothing else...
...The pictures of the counting and recounting were not only the developing record of an important election...
...Once he was good and ready, Murdoch established a news service on cable, also named Fox after the founders of the Hollywood studio he had taken over...
...Time Warner has itself recently been absorbed by America Online, and as this is being read the accountants are decreeing cuts and slashes throughout the Time Warner organization...
...The Berlin Wall being built, and the Berlin Wall being torn down...
...journalists tend to stick together...
...When THE Florida Supreme Court ordered ballots from a couple of counties recounted in a state courtroom, they were moved from the southern part of the state to its capital, Tallahassee, in a rented Ryder truck...
...The Presidential transition provided other occasions for interesting coverage...
...Contents are veering to more and more "soft news" material: minor medical advances, anniversaries and other tales of past years, the reunions of long separated twins, the results of opinion polls...
...Its interviewers are self-aggrandizingly aggressive, some of its reporters are better than competent, and its general attitude reflects the conservative know-nothingism of its proprietor...
...CNN leans heavily on analysis and individual opinion, with a penchant also for setting up artificial confrontations in shows with names like Crossfire and Capital Gang...
...In newspaper city rooms and major broadcast newsrooms they called it the Chicken Noodle Network...
...Tom Rosenstiel, the director of something called the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and Bill Kovach, the former director of the Nieman fellowship program at Harvard who is now chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "...the medium of television did not distinguish itself with digging, enterprise or reflection...
...The new management, having decided that CNN's programming was getting stodgy and dusty, brought in producers to make it over...
...CNN learned that...
...Where, then, will news come from...
...Fox, following its sibling, the New York Post, will give up the joy of a Right-wing screed for a good brawl...
...It hired whoever was available and affordable, replacing them with better people as money became more plentiful and managers learned their trade...
...In addition, an event that might not warrant sending a crew gets the benefit of the doubt because at the very least something will be used on cable...
...It didn't work...
...In 1996 Time Warner, which was Time Inc...
...A picture is a symbol, not a fact...
...You decide...
...Not everybody appreciated the significance of all-news cable providing the details, the continuity, the tediums between the high points...
...Audiences for the evening newscasts are shrinking and aging...
...Both stand-alone independent news sites and those operated by newspapers and other established news media are being dismantled or dramatically cut back...
...Ratings blipped a little...
...One truly felt, perhaps for the first time, what the visionary pioneers of television like Pat Weaver meant over half a century ago when they foresaw in the medium the vehicle of universal involvement, the sense not only of being there but of taking part as history was painfully, agonizingly being made...
...One reporter and camera crew can, on occasion, cover an important story for a regular network news program, MSNBC and the financial cable network, CNBC, which NBC also owns...
...Academics analyzing international events took into account "the CNN effect...
...Then it began to turn a profit...
...It covered everything that happened, live, from start to finish—in the state courts, in the appeals courts, in the Florida Supreme Court...
...But they also wrote: "The most intriguing moments were precisely those when we watched the process itself...
...But as the traditional networks lowered their emphasis on news from abroad, CNN established bureaus everywhere...
...Its founder, the picaresque Ted Turner, watches impotently from the sidelines, a historical figure...
...It will not be enough to have large audiences for big news and small ones for no news...
...The networks, of course, did their duty by interrupting regular programs from time to time—as they used to in the "old days," but with less frequency—for the occasional bulletin announcing a rare finite and definable development...
...The prophecies about the Internet soon emerging as the prime medium for news are crumbling to dust...
...The bare top of a yellow truck had meaning because everyone watching knew what was inside...
...They whittled away at CNN's audience, but it was still the leader last Election Day and by and large holds that lead today...
...When there is no news or nothing of an overwhelming nature to relate, all three fill time with set programs...
...Like the Fox News Channel, MSNBC is sprightlier than CNN...
...in the Florida Legislature and the conference room of Florida's Secretary of State...
...Those 36 days were the validation of all-news cable...
...Nearly a decade of war in Vietnam is compressed by memory into the face of a North Vietnamese lieutenant as he was being shot in the head by the chief of South Vietnam's police, and that of a naked girl, perhaps 10 or 12, running screaming down a village street, her back blazing from American napalm...
...When the Senate held committee hearings into the qualifications of the new President's Cabinet appointees, all three 24/7s covered them live...
...In contrast, when a broadcast network has finished a news bulletin, it returns to a soap opera, to Oprah, to a situation comedy or police drama...
...Even in the aggregate, its doubled audience rarely reached eight digits...
...Electoral politics are recalled as President Harry S. Truman holding up for the camera the Chicago Tribune headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, orGovernor Michael S. Dukakis' helmeted head in the turret of an Army tank...
...There were other symbols...
...Tom Shales wrote in the Washington Post: "The Longest Election Night banished, at least temporarily, the notion that politics is uncool, that faithfully following news from Washington is only for nerds and wonks...
...in quiet times they contracted and CNN became merely another element in the white noise of our noisy time...
...And it was indeed a drama, with nothing less than the Presidency of the United States at stake...
...Newspaper writers and other acolytes of the word made mild fun, missing the point...
...It is operated by NBC News and was originally financed by a large investment from Microsoft...
...News costs money...
...Waiting to learn who won on Election Night lasted until dawn in 1968, and past noon in 1960, but in the year 2000 it took almost 900 hours...
...He built it into a significant success without them...
...The murdered President John F. Kennedy's widow whispering to her small son as he saluted his father's casket...
...The accountant is the last one fired...
...for the United States Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling that it was over...
...A few went beyond considering the role of all-news cable to reviewing the three competing services individually and comparatively, tossing a kudo here, a brickbat there...
...The Great Depression was summed up in the anguished face of a frightened mother contemplating the Dust Bowl...
...Other newspapers were more discerning...
...Change will perforce come gradually...
...Out of the 36 days from Election Day 2000 to December 12, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that there should be no further counting of Florida's Presidential votes, the image that endures is of a balding, bulging-eyed member of the Broward County canvassing board holding a punch-card ballot against the light as he tries to fathom the intent of the voter...
...On very slow days, newspaper columnists have been able to achieve their full 800 words gleefully tearing this slogan to shreds...
...in the rooms where ballots were being recounted by patient, exhausted public servants doing their best...
...before it acquired Warner Brothers, bought and absorbed CNN...
...The oldest of the all-news, 24 hours a day, seven days a week cable services is CNN, the Cable News Network, founded in 1980 by Ted Turner...
...CNN is changing its nature, its way of presenting news, its very reason for being...
...The second relatively new 24/7 cable service is MSNBC, a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft...
...It was underfunded, underequipped and forced to go through a clumsy learning process in full public view...
...Initially, few took it seriously...
...For many, World War II lasted from Hitler slapping his knee at Compiègne to the Marines raising Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi...
...It also may be learning that there is no formula for increasing audiences during slow news periods and continuing as an all-news network...
...Word went around that there was a TV set turned to CNN in every foreign ministry...
...Something was rotten in the states...
...The future of the country, and yes the world, was riding in a yellow truck...
...Precisely...
...That there is a medium ready for the responsibility is not the whole story...
...Later, television etched in our memory systems mankind's reach into space—the countdowns, the thrusting flames, how Earth looks from orbit, a human foot touching the moon...
...Who then would be President of the United States...
...The guiding principle seems to be, "Whatever works...
...for an official statement...
...A raucous crowd of outsiders, organized primarily in the Washington office of House Republican Whip Tom DeLay, created such disorder in the counting room of the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board —shouting and challenging, then pounding on the door when the board tried to escape them by retiring to a smaller, secure room—that eventually the count was discontinued...
...With the considerable resources and personnel of NBC News and Microsoft's money, enough staff and state-of-the-art equipment were available from the start...
...As for Fox and MSNBC, their ratings plummeted as soon as the election was decided...
...When Murdoch first put together a standard broadcast network out of some stations he bought and affiliates he recruited, he felt no need for network news programs...
...Its slogan is the innocuous, "We report...
...in the sunny, wind-swept plazas of official buildings where opposing legislators, contending lawyers and importedpoliticians had their say, claimed their victories and denounced all shenanigans except their own...
...MSNBC enjoys packaging programs out of its news film and videotape archives, and fills other hours replaying reports originally broadcast by NBC News...
...No one who watched would ever be the same when entering a voting booth...
...During the Gulf War and the O. J. Simpson trial audiences expanded...
...Three reports for the price of one...
...Reporters whose names are hardly known become headline material in newspapers when they are fired...
...Everyone knows someone who "could not leave the house" as the drama unfolded...
...The image of bully boys pounding fists on the window of the door to the new canvassing room brought a whiff of the late days of Weimar to an American election...
...A political year that had never risen beyond mediocrity was culminating in five weeks of tension and a roller coaster of hopes and disappointments never before experienced by the people watching...
...Its audience doubled and occasionally even tripled their customary levels...
...But then what...
...the details don't matter...
...Several papers, like the New York Daily News, recognized that there was at the very least a new player in the business...
...About four years ago, two competitors came on the scene...
...Discussing news is cheaperthan coveringnews...
...When the news was minuscule or piddling, what they returned to was often silly opinionation and bloviation of the sort we have become too accustomed to...
...As the all-news cable channels covered other parts of the story breaking all over the state, they often switched back to the Ryder truck and its armed escort of State Police driving north along the Interstate...
...Helicopters with live TV cameras followed it...
...But the people who watched saw everything, unedited, virtually unmediated...
...CNN may not be the worst sufferer, but its sufferings are the most public...
...Many dared not turn off their TV sets for fear of missing the slightest change, the smallest news item...
...I do not mean to suggest that all-news cable was being watched universally...
...Every minute of them was transmitted to an avid, exhausted electorate by only one medium, all-news cable...
...The network morning programs, once hailed as "setting the agenda for America," are turning into vaudevilles...
...It gained acceptance, even recognition...
...They were the disturbing revelation of weaknesses in the voting systems of every county of every state...
...Allnews cable had entered the contemporary celebrity culture...
...The advantages to efficiency are enormous...
...One of the competitors is Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel...
...Any night, any network newscast attracts more viewers than all of all-news cable...
...What if there had been an accident, a natural disaster...
...for the winning candidate's declaration of assumption and his defeated opponent's appeal for continuity...
...This is not an unimportant question...
...Ratings translate into income...
...But the uncertainties, the nuances, the frustrations, the interactions of those five weeks were the province of all-news cable...
...During the 36 days of our longest election night, they measured up to the needs of an anxious audience...
...Given the inherent impulses of television and the history of our time, we may even have already seen the finest hours of allnews cable...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
