On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television A Loser's Game By Reuven Frank A popular cartoon, available on wallpaper, cocktail napkins and an animated screen saver, has a small fish being devoured by a slightly...
...Always cited is the blogosphere's capacity to detect errors perpetrated by the mainstream media...
...about co-ops, condos and rentals...
...Alfred Hitchcock made a movie called Foreign Correspondent, starring Joel McCrea in a trenchcoat...
...Who needs that...
...The statistics, naturally, do not account for scores of blogs lying dormant in the vast expanse of cyberspace as so much invisible digital debris...
...Perhaps this was because the Korean War did not last so long, no violent opposition appeared on TV every night, and there was no generational conflict...
...This kind of analysis has been rattling around for a couple of years...
...Those outside the craft tend to think news is judged by what is important, but journalists are not specialists in such determinations...
...That many newspapers, including the New York Times, are on the Web too means their online versions may have larger readerships than their print versions, and some of those online readers are quick to bring errors to the attention of editors...
...But it is no substitute for a rounded and comprehensive professional news service...
...In any event, since Vietnam the audience for television network news has declined, as it indeed has for news in all media...
...But the reaction to the Korean fighting did not parallel the response to Vietnam...
...consensus on what is considered important, but the true measurement of importance is the province of historians not yet born...
...Radio, rather piddling as a news medium until then, took front position with names like H.V...
...But its most prominent—and perhaps most magisterial—recent expression was an essay in the New York Times Book Review by Federal Judge Richard A. Posner that filled the cover page and fourmore inside...
...When there is interesting news people are interested...
...Subjecting yourself to a couple of hours of jabber on any of those cable networks drives this home...
...CBS, an also-ran in entertainment, made its name on its reporting staff in Europe, with Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from London during Nazi bombing raids...
...To begin with, Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported in early August that only 2 per cent of Americans who go online read a blog once a week or more...
...There is also an old doggerel about fleas that have smaller fleas to bite 'em, and the smaller fleas have smaller fleas, so on ad infinitum...
...Defining news is a loser's game, yet people keep trying...
...Starting with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the American majority was willingly enlisted in a battle validated by television's reporting and images...
...And more...
...Or, as Posner puts it, "The industry's critics agree that the function of the news is to inform people about social, political, cultural, ethical, and economic issues so that they can vote and otherwise express themselves as responsible citizens...
...Television as a commercial enterprise was postponed by World War IPs needs for its technicians and technologies...
...about foster homes, nursing homes, hospitals, and homeless shelters...
...Newspapers assign staff reporters to cull them for story tips or to write about them...
...News is also about hurricanes and automobile pileups and unseasonable blizzards...
...Some evenings NBC's newscast drew more viewers than the era's ultimate TV entertainer, Milton Berle...
...Nevertheless, Posner and the others are right, to a degree...
...Newspapers have been dying since they were born, and today, in fact, are a very profitable business...
...The Manichean simplicity of the conflict suited TV's favoring narrative pictures that were not only graphic but symbolic...
...They get 12 million people to write rather than just stare passively at a screen...
...Nor should it be forgotten that far fewer American homes had TV sets, and those tended to be the homes of the well-to-do...
...The most telling example, and the one most often mentioned, is the blogger who recognized that the documents about George W. Bush's Vietnam-era service in the Air National Guard were composed on a typewriter using a typeface not available until long after the service supposedly took place...
...Then there is the often repeated concern that blogs are unedited and therefore irresponsible—that for every corrective contribution the blogosphere makes to journalism it imposes at least one egregious mistake on the news-consuming public...
...was caught up in bitter debate between Interventionists and Isolationists, but Hollywood was Anglophile...
...about fire walls, retaining walls and the Great Wall of China...
...People who opine about news seem to have (acquired) memories reaching back only to the years leading up to World War II, when events abroad— in Russia, Italy and Germany—alerted the chattering classes to looming troubles...
...Is this a steady decline or a trough in a rhythmic cycle...
...Moreover, the critics are mistaken in treating them as the two sides of one coin...
...There is a vague (elite...
...Its advent coincided with the early days of the Cold War, making for an astounding symbiosis...
...There is no doubt that the audience for news in all media is shrinking at present, or that technological change affects which medium is favored by those who want news...
...TV news is said to have diminished the printed press, virtually wiping out afternoon newspapers...
...Salted with passing references to eight books to justify its placement, the piece postulated that newspapers are surely about to die...
...Cable grabbed the news prize from network TV, and now the Internet—with its trumpeted blogs—is trumping cable...
...He said, "News is what your city editor tells you it is...
...On Television A Loser's Game By Reuven Frank A popular cartoon, available on wallpaper, cocktail napkins and an animated screen saver, has a small fish being devoured by a slightly larger fish, which in turn is consumed by a bigger fish that is overtaken by a still larger fish, and so on for half a dozen or more iterations...
...After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, foreign news became multipolar and more difficult to follow...
...The good people of North Podunk became as familiar with West Berlin, the news capital of the Cold War, as they were with South Podunk...
...about locusts, baldeagles and missing persons...
...The case can be made that the "first living room war" took place a decade earlier in Korea...
...Hardly...
...In addition to the pictures of young GIs wounded and dying, draft card burnings and the disorder outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago prompted Americans who had accepted, even respected what television had brought them, to turn the other way...
...Sound familiar...
...There is no way, either, to know how many of the 12 million blogs are alive...
...They agree on the related point that journalism is a profession rather than just a trade and therefore that journalists and their employers must not allow profit considerations to dominate, but must acknowledge an ethical duty to report the news accurately, soberly, without bias, reserving the expression of political preferences for the editorial page and its radio and television counterparts...
...It is all so logical, so pat...
...One could more reasonably argue, however, that this resulted from the difficulty of delivering papers during afternoon city traffic...
...Inside the trade we learned the price of showing viewers what they did not want to see...
...TV coverage was equally detailed and dramatic, and was avidly followed...
...Major newspapers, like the Chicago Daily News, built reputations on skilled foreign staffs...
...The history of American network television news, where the most funeral wreaths are being laid these days, tells the story...
...Anyone can start one, and millions do...
...The tired businessman returning home in the evening was assaulted with accounts of fratricide in "former Yu7 goslavia," starvation, corruption and genocide in African countries he did not know existed, convoluted and bloody antagonisms in remote shards of what we once comfortably lumped together as the Soviet Union...
...A journalism instructor at Louisiana State University writes in Editor & Publisher of a young woman in his class wishing to start up a Web journal for "college women thinking about engineering careers...
...From the Christian Science Monitor to the Online Journalism Review, there has lately been a growing recognition that viewing blogs as a freestanding and pervasive form of journalism is simply romantic twaddle...
...A professional journalist's expertise lies in recognizing what is interesting, what (enough) people would want to know if they were told...
...Academics, even deans of journalism, find them fascinating and hail them as the democratization of news...
...It's as if the Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising— They enable unorthodox views to get a hearing...
...John and George Hicks...
...Writing in the Web magazine Slate, Jack Shafer found these positions easy to demolish...
...Medium aside, it is startling to contemplate how close the profile of what is now considered news comes to the model for news after World War I. Those passing prophetic judgments on the state of journalism would do well to consider the similarity...
...They are really separate issues...
...Is this the journalism of tomorrow...
...Either of the above could serve as a metaphor for the evolving conventional wisdom about the current state of the media, as each successive technology overwhelms its predecessor...
...News may (or may not) fit the definitions offered by Posner and other detractors, but only partly...
...How does that track with, to take one example, the notably intense interest among ordinary Americans this past August in the rescue of a Russian submarine and its crew by a British unit with American help...
...Those who are literate in such matters say that many people start a blog, never go back to it, and do not bother to cancel it...
...The U.S...
...The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the journalistic establishment," Posner writes, "is the blog___In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise—not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs...
...As for the technology of the journalism of tomorrow, the consensus of disinterested observers has determined the future belongs to blogs, Internet sites that are virtually uncontrolled...
...CNN, MSNBC and the others have veered Right, not Left, hoping to emulate Fox' success...
...and that the multiplicity of sources and the competition for breaking stories has increased the number of errors in the news we get...
...The only definition I ever found useful was given by an adjunct professor of journalism who was an assistant managing editor at the New York Herald-Tribune, of cherished memory...
...This lasted until Vietnam, when what was then described as the "first living room war" dragged on and became a matter of bitter contention...
...Posner's approach is, understandably, lawyerly...
...about workmen falling off scaffolding, Fourth of July fireworks and St...
...Posner writes, "A survey by the National Opinion Research Center finds that the public's confidence in the press declined from about 85 per cent in 1973 to 59 per cent in 2002, with most of the decline occurring since 1991...
...She deserted her blog after one entry, and it floats in the ether with the other orphans...
...After the War started and before Pearl Harbor, interest intensified...
...It was the first thread in the unraveling of a mighty edifice...
...Like other self-proclaimed disinterested media observers, lawyers tend to look upon news dissemination as exclusively part of the political process...
...about runaway taxicabs, illegal gamblers and people on death row...
...Neither is a new phenomenon, though...
...She told him the responses she received included "spam and 50-year-old men asking for dates, nude pictures, or both...
...But before that, there were the '20s— the Jazz Age, flappers, prohibition, a sensationalist press, William Randolph Hearst's Right-wing editorials, Floyd Collins trapped for days in a cave, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the trial and execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Tammany Hall and New York Mayor James J. Walker, Al Capone and the Half Moon Hotel...
...In an age of specialization and professionalism, they give amateurs a platform...
...Patrick's Day parades...
...Not mentioned by Posner or others is the obvious fact that the dropoff coincided with the implosion of the Soviet Union...
...Kaltenborn, Robert St...
...about marital discord, abandoned children and drug pushers...
...It might calm their nerves...
...about earthquakes, tidal waves and drought...
...that the success of Fox' Right-wing cable news channel has pushed CNN and its other rivals to the Left to pickup viewers alienated by Fox...
...Further, we are told that any news at all turns off the post-baby boom generations, adding to the growing number of people no longer paying attention to the news...
...about malnutrition in Bangladesh and conspicuous consumption in Shanghai...
...about polio and SARS, tuberculosis and AIDS, Ebola virus and avian flu...
...Most observers cite polls that show the worst decline setting in around 1990...
Vol. 88 • September 2005 • No. 5
