News Without Controversy
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television News Without Controversy By Reuven Frank WHAT LINGERS from last December's Indian Ocean tsunami is the memory of survivors' eyes as they stared into television cameras....
...One American radio reporter unabashedly referred to him as a "hero-astronaut...
...As always when a news event captures international attention, newspapers sold more copies, and both network television stations and all-news cable increased audiences...
...Many (most...
...But when the public wanted news it turned to them...
...Well over a century ago, in 1883, there was Krakatoa, the volcano eruption that killed 40,000, caused half an island to disappear into the sea and blotted out the sun, turning daylight to night around the world...
...Opposing the Vietnam War also became liberal...
...Eliot's words, "Eyes 1 dare not meet in dreams"—large, brown, velvet eyes flecked with highlights, like fresh chestnuts...
...It swept through the Indian Ocean, killing and destroying along seafronts and islands in a dozen countries, as far away as the Horn of Africa...
...The eyes of mothers who cannot even now stop their tears...
...Initially, the tragedies brought forth a torrent of support, of private money and government money and money from organizations...
...The first Wonder Bread crew of seven uniformed test pilots, the Mercury Astronauts, were accorded mythic status in all the media...
...gathering and presenting breaking news...
...It was a strange accusation...
...Some will remember the following confrontation: A half dozen college-age black people are sitting at a lunch counter in a Woolworth's...
...Nor could anyone who had watched television shut out the images of the orphaned and the widowed and the desolated...
...But even during that conflict there was a major, continuing noncontroversial news story: America had launched itself into the exploration of what used to be called "outer space"—not with John F. Kennedy's promise to reach the moon, but with Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1955 declaration of the International Geophysical Year...
...So the feeling was that if the networks were not trying to promote racial integration, why were they covering these stories...
...To some extent that image has been burnished by the country moving to the Right...
...military...
...There was to be a space rocket called the Vanguard, run by the U.S...
...It had immediately moved reporters and camera crews (a first wave of 50 people) throughout the blighted area—a part of the world usually so remote from the concerns of the day elsewhere that few news organizations maintain staffthere...
...He owed part of his subsequent fame as a politician to his "answering' what was shown on the network news program that had just preceded him...
...We in the trade take it on faith that although no human can be free of preferences and attitudes and political commitments, being professional means putting the personal aside when reporting and editing...
...To trace the various events of the civil rights struggle—from Birmingham to Selma, from Little Rock to "I have a dream"—is to sense the swelling bitterness of a substantial part of the population against the news they were getting, and those who were bringing it to them...
...They were, in T.S...
...TELEVISION network news grew up coincidentally with the Cold War, and they formed a symbiosis...
...When else would a savvy agitator hold a press conference...
...This was the greatest natural disaster in living memory...
...A young woman is visibly mishandled...
...However that, or most of it, was not foreign news...
...Almost 300,000 people died, more than two-thirds of them in Indonesia...
...There is not much news coverage anymore, but the image of the victims' eyes still haunt...
...Americans seem to have been persuaded that the national media are too liberal to be trusted, even though ninetenths of news has nothing to do with Right or Left...
...Finkelstein appears to have had a transcending impact...
...Later, Union stalwarts became "Reagan Democrats...
...It devastated most of the strongly Muslim and separatist province of Aceh, where civil war had been going on for 30 years...
...Wasn't it always...
...The earthquake that struck the northem tip of Sumatra, the largest and westernmost island of Indonesia, registered an amazing 9.3 on the Richter scale...
...From Spiro Agnew's charging that a New York cabal of executives decides what the country should know to Richard Scaife Mellon's funding Rightwing attacks to the conservative talking heads on radio and cable, the campaign has been a succession of successes...
...Too many journalists these days go about their work walking on eggs because so many subjects, regardless of how they are handled, elicit explosive public (and official) reactions...
...The starkness and simplicity of television images bolstered, without anyone's intent, the position of the US...
...Advocating changes in civil rights, certainly if "too much" or "too fast," was liberal...
...The society they were challenging resisted and resented...
...One is overweight and jowly...
...The act of news coverage was denounced as agitation...
...the catalog goes on and on...
...There is blood running down a face...
...Who will love them now...
...A search company that tracks blogs noted a mere 100,000 of them two years ago...
...Television coverage of the Vietnam War—partly the scenes of fighting, more importantly the antiwar demonstrators and their actions through the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago—similarly showed people what they would rather not have seen...
...In those days, most Americans strongly trusted the news they were receiving on the little magic box...
...Professional journalists are on the defensive, and timidity is not unknown...
...Godless Communism was perfect fodder for the black-and-white film cameras of early TV...
...a second is rhythmically smacking a black eight-battery flashlight into the palm of his free hand...
...The public pays attention, even avidly, when the news seems politically neutral: fires, car accidents, celebrity dalliances, flushots, tsunamis...
...I told her to hold on tight...
...The Manichean world of the West vs...
...Until the 1930s, say, reporters were considered a raffish lot, not to be taken seriously...
...Bloggers, some of whom call themselves citizen journalists, are merely a resource, like eyewitnesses...
...Significantly, CNN gained more than the Fox News Channel...
...While "people were talking" about CNN's Anderson Cooper, no one was talking about anybody from Fox...
...The relief effort has involved the entire globe...
...They were no longer to be trusted...
...Another important point is that when there is real news to be reported, it still takes a professional reporter to get it...
...the sea had gone berserk, and the solid ground was unreliable...
...The other major continuing news stories of the time were far less consensual...
...When Ted Koppel announced he would devote an edition ofthe ABCNewsprogramMgAfline to reading the names of soldiers killed in Iraq, several stations decided the program was antiwar and refused to carry it...
...There are those like Orville Schell, dean of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who have been saying that it would be the bloggers, the privateers of the Internet, who would bring us the news of tomorrow...
...At first, the South's response was that "outside agitators" were egging on the demonstrators and making sure the national media, the "New York" media, knew when and where to be to get their pictures...
...My grandson has one, and so do his friends...
...Bodies continue to be found...
...There is a scuffle...
...The eyes of fathers and brothers, men of slight frames and hard muscles, farmers and fishermen, searching morgues, checking bulletin boards, peering under the plastic sheeting covering corpses laid out in the public road...
...Worldwide interest in the disaster and its victims has expectedly died down...
...In Mumbai, India, a trio of them set up a special site, coordinated word and picture contributions from other bloggers, started an ever growing list of the missing and another of survivors, and made themselves part of the coverage...
...The networks had permanent bureaus in the major capitals of Europe and Asia then, and the doings of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council were daily fare...
...Navy, that would place in orbit a manmade satellite...
...Now the 21 st-century news event that captured the whole world's attention was made vivid by the oldest of crafts: professional news people, reporters journey ing to the scene to describe what they saw, cameramen pointing their lenses at orphaned children, grieving adults, rubble and destruction...
...This is not a good sign...
...New technology gets it to you faster, and in color...
...But even in that society, few could deny that as depicted in the TV news cameraman's film the young people looked to be in the right...
...What bloggers did, although valuable, was what amateur radio operators do...
...Fox, supported by universally available bloggers' pictures and some staff it sent to proprietor Rupert Murdoch's British satellite channel, BskyB TV, relied on a reporter in Thailand...
...At the time, furthermore, it was not an isolated incident but part of an outbreak of such happenings, young black Americans risking themselves to demand the right to be treated like all other Americans...
...The implication, clearly, was that these were not the "strengths' of the Fox News Channel...
...Defining the media as "liberal" has also been an ongoing and well-financed enterprise...
...Some things never die...
...In the case of Vietnam, and even more with civil rights, the very act of providing coverage struck too many Americans as one-sided...
...In the event, the Navy was not up to the job...
...it was Cold War news...
...A Congressman accused H. Rap Brown, a civil rights leader trying to desegregate public swimming pools in Maryland, of timing his press conference to make the six o'clock TV news...
...Whatever revisionist historians now say, there was virtually no American opposition to the Cold War until containing Communism begat war in Vietnam...
...The Army took over, using recycled German scientists led by Wernher von Braun, and it was the Russians who first launched a man-made satellite...
...The quake then set in motion the kind of tidal wave that is known by the Japanese term tsunami...
...Gradually—and not so gradually—it became dogma in the American South that the national media were inflaming, even causing, the fight for civil rights...
...today the figure is over 8 million...
...But it was the old, established news institutions, the ones bloggers airily dismiss as MSM—mainstream media—that informed the world...
...Stars or not, they ate what they could find, slept when and where they could, and day after day they reported...
...Indeed, the most important ones, Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights, were not merely controversial, they were divisive—as was covering them...
...Yet a lot of it predates all that and goes back to the history of television news in the United States...
...They are approached by several sheriffs' deputies in uniform...
...The trade press, summarizing the coverage, said CNN had "played to its strengths"—i.e...
...According to pollsters who ask about such things, the confidence of Americans in journalists is at some kind of low, down there with used car salesmen and those who sell insurance...
...They might not admit this if asked, possibly because much of it is subconscious, but news has become a contentious trade...
...That the tsunami was a story essentially without controversy is also of consequence...
...The continually shrinking cost of electronic communication has loosed secret journalistic pretensions all over the globe, and bloggers were indeed responsible for many of the TV pictures and eyewitness accounts of the tsunami...
...That has been true for more than a century...
...The public's trust in TV news was shrinking...
...As in the case of 9/11, the President of the United States dithered for a day before asserting leadership...
...The space adventure has had little opposition to this day...
...Hardly anyone who could read was untouched by the newspaper accounts of the reporters around the rim of the Indian Ocean, the astounding full extent of the disaster...
...The tsunami was a story among other stories, like tax cuts and the Ohio Presidential vote recount...
...Relief work continues, and some awareness may be maintained by the appointment of former President Bill Clinton as United Nations ambassador in charge of organizing and supervising relief distribution...
...Conceivably the intensity of television images widened divisions and sharpened hostilities, or that could have happened with the older media and we have just forgotten...
...Now they tend to hold advanced degrees...
...The college kids are told to clear out...
...Yes, but not to the present extent...
...The currently observed disenchantment of the American public with its news sources may date from the coverage of those two stories...
...The eyes of children who were beyond crying but might never laugh again, who had lost those who loved them...
...The networks, though, blanketed the area with their news stars...
...State Department, and, by extension, the U.S...
...Some of this is due to the rise of the 24/7 all-news cable channels, with their displays of contrived arguments, invective and shouting...
...SOMETIME during the '60s, a politicai operative named Arthur Finkelstein taught the Republican party how to use the word "liberal," once something of a compliment, as an insult— through strident repetition accompanied by a sneer...
...By any standard, that event was news...
...It is usually personal, posts opinions and facts, invites comments and argument, and is dedicated above all to that catchword of today's New Age communication, "interaction...
...CBS brought in Dan Rather...
...In occupied Tokyo and Berlin, not surprisingly, accredited American reporters enjoyed PX privileges, sent their children to U.S.run schools and generally lived the life of an elite...
...ABC's Peter Jennings was advised by doctors not to go because he was fighting a respiratory infection, but Diane Sawyer ofGood Morning America went...
...Among the strongest advocates ofthat view was one Jesse Helms, editorialist for WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina...
...Did only racists think otherwise, or flinch at the prospect of comfortable established patterns being disturbed...
...And again, "I told her to hold on tight...
...In signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon B. Johnson knew he was handing the South to the Republicans...
...Divided Berlin, the Iron Curtain, stories of the Gulag, the death of Josef Stalin, the CIA in Jacobo Arbenz' Guatemala, and Mohammed Mossadegh's Iran...
...NBC sent Brian Williams...
...Other reports are either ignored or discounted...
...Still, a child born on the day of the calamity will be a college graduate before reconstruction is completed...
...Moreover, for many Americans it goes without saying that the national media are biased and the bias is "liberal...
...I was holding her little hand when the wave came...
...What the New York Times said might have bothered them, but few in Macon or Baton Rouge read it The network television programs from New York, though, come into every Southern home, and it's hard to argue with pictures...
...It was as if they were in the wrong millennium...
...After Alan Shepard became the first American to orbit the earth, accounts of his flight sounded like Radio Moscow in their uncritical effusiveness...
...Moreover, contrary to received wisdom, it will watch news if there truly is news to watch...
...Whatever, the very act of reporting on either story made people with strongly held opinions denounce the journalism as advocacy...
...Today, many decry the lack of consistent foreign reporting and hark back to the years following World War II...
...Critics note that this leaves out story selection, what news will be reported and what ignored...
...A blog, short for Web log, is ajournai available on the Internet...
...A recent survey of American high school students found them believing the American press has too much freedom...
Vol. 88 • March 2005 • No. 2
