CULTURE

...The number and ornateness of the weather maps on local news, and the endlessly amazing developments in special-effects technology to observe climate changes and movements of impending "fronts" is truly mind-boggling...

...Don't bother too much about that stuff," say the guys and gals in the anchor chairs...

...Only, unlike the Utopian villages of soap opera and fairy tale, these "imagined communities" are supposed to be, pretend to be, real and true...

...Not that local news ignores the politically important stories...

...Their invention has conquered the TV world...

...Who needs this stuff...

...Local news today is the single most profitable form of nonfiction television programming in the country and, for most stations, the only thing they actually produce...

...Today, when gangsta rap has replaced gangster movies, and television has replaced newsprint as the primary source of information (for two-thirds of us, the only source), Cagney's famous question is not only antiquated, it is beside the point...

...The lesson is not that people are stupid, venal, "addicted," or otherwise blameworthy for their fascinated interest in junk TV...

...They march at the head of holiday parades and shake hands and kiss babies at openings of malls and industrial parks...

...In postmodern America, after all, this kind of brand-name synthetic familiarity appears to be the only thing that holds us—a nation of endlessly uprooted and mobile strangers— together...

...The news teams also bring us gossip, at a time when more and more of us are lonely and scared of each other...

...The rise of local news, the infotainment monster that ate the news industry, is a long and painful story about a key battle-front in the endless media war between capitalism and democracy, between the drive for profits and the constitutional responsibility of those licensed to use the airwaves to serve the public interest...

...That is their primary function...

...Maria and The Donald, Michael and Lisa Marie, Lyle and Julia, Richard and Cindy—we know and love these people and delight in sharing the latest bits of harmless scandal about them with co-workers and other semi-intimates...

...They are getting what they always sought in fantasy and fiction, from The Wizard of Oz to As the World Turns...

...The gossip is not about our actual neighbors of course, those suspicious, different-looking folks who just moved in...

...Well, not entirely anyway...

...Tsk, tsk," they cluck at news of yet another gang rampage or Congressional scandal...

...It is, far more tragically, that public and private life today are increasingly unjust, inhumane, painful, even hopeless, materially and spiritually, for many of us...

...They often cannot pronounce the local names and foreign words they read from teleprompters...

...What we hear when we consume "the news" has only the most marginal relationship to what we know about anything...

...As Don Henley once put it, in a scathing song about the local-news phenomenon, "It's interesting when people die...

...As time went by, this tendency toward cookie-cutter formulas, exported far and wide from a central media source, reached ever more depressing depths...

...The town or city in question, whether Manhattan or Moose Hill, Montana, is presided over by a group of attractive, charming, well-dressed performers—whose agents, salaries, and movements up and down the ladder of media success, gauged by the size of the "market" they infiltrate, are chronicled each week in Variety...

...The trend has led to ever more nationally produced, generic features exported to local stations to be passed off as "local...

...And for that reason they are more troubling than the trashiest or silliest of pop-culture fictions.* Elayne Rapping, most recently the author of "Media-tions," published by South End Press, appears in this space every other month...

...is the criterion for news producers, and it is, understandably, the weather and sports that most people, most of the time, are likely to sit still for...

...The sets, the news lineups, the anchors, the weather maps, the sports features—all developed for a New York City market—quickly became a universal formula, sent out to every network affiliate and independent station in America, complete with fill-in-the-blanks guidelines for adaptation to any community, no matter how large or small, urban or rural...

...Nope, said the marketing whizzes, this master model of "The News" will buy us the most overall-ratings bang per buck...

...To make sure it stays that way, most members of the Federal Communications Commission are appointed—no matter who's in the White House—from the ranks of the industry itself...

...It is not only that public life is inconsequential, after all...

...It's so horrible," they say over and over again, like wind-up dolls with a limited repertoire of three-word phrases, when asked about a local disaster...

...But they sure can smile...

...I'm referring to what passes for news in the homes and minds of the vast majority of Americans today: the Eyewitless, Happy Talk local newscasts that run in many cities for as much as an hour and a half to two hours a day, on as many as seven or eight different channels...

...They are the neighbors—often thought of as friends by the loneliest among us—we wish we had in real life, there to do the right thing on every occasion...

...And what's said and seen in that brief interlude is hardly enlightening...

...Indeed, if there is any phenomenon that gives dramatic support to Leonard Cohen's baleful lines, "Everybody knows the war is over/ Everybody knows the good guys lost," it's the specter of local news, slouching roughly across a wider and wider stretch of airwave time, planting its brainless images as it goes...

...When you turn on the news, whether at home or in an airport or Holiday Inn in some totally strange locale, you see a predictable, comforting spectacle...

...But why should that surprise us, in a national landscape now filled, from coast to coast, with identical, mass-produced shopping malls that pass for town marketplaces, and hotels and airports that pass for village inns...

...Hard news affecting local communities takes up only a minute or two more air-time than national events...

...So today we have a phenomenon euphemistically called "local news," although it is anything but, filled with images of a pseudo-community called "America," which is actually closer to Disney World in its representation of American life...

...I'm not referring here to CNN or the "evening news" on the national broadcast networks...

...And there is no relief in sight except, ironically, on the local newscasts that are a respite from reality...

...We know who's winning, of course...

...Try to find these things in overpopulated, polluted, socially vexed and violent LA today...

...This reassurance is sometimes subtle...

...On the contrary, the hole for "hard news" is generally filled with sound bites and head shots, packaged and processed by the networks, from news conferences with the handful of movers and shakers considered "newsworthy"—the President and his key henchmen and adversaries, mostly...

...never to look at or listen to the pathetic souls who regularly beg for money or ramble incoherently in the hope that someone, anyone, will take pity and respond...

...And local teams are obsessed with "man-on-the-street" spot interviews...

...Neighbors on local TV are forever gasping and wailing the most cliched of reflex responses to actual local horrors, whether personal or social...

...Eyewitness News and its various clones allow us to believe, just for a moment, that there really is a Santa Claus, a Mary Poppins, a Good Samaritan giving away fortunes to the needy, a spirit of Christmas Past to convert the most cold-hearted of corporate Scrooges...

...National news items typically take up less than two minutes of a half-hour segment...

...The researchers are not entirely wrong, after all, about what people in this kind of society want...

...Who wants it...

...Wrap it up and send it out...

...On the contrary, it is those responsible for the quality of our public life who are more deserving of such terms of contempt and opprobrium...

...The Jeffersonian notion that public media should cover what citizens "need to know" was not a big consideration...

...More annoying still, they ignored the possibility that individual viewers, of all kinds, might want and need different things at different times for different reasons...

...And since so much of our news is indeed personally terrifying and depressing, we need to have it delivered as cleverly and carefully as possible...

...Remember when California was God's country, the Promised Land of Milk and Honey, to which people migrated for clean air, good jobs, and single-dwelling homes...

...And people most certainly do perceive public life as inconsequential and worse these days, whether outside their doors or in Washington or on Wall Street...

...Only I don't think it is primarily the desire to "play" that drives people in droves to local newscasts, or even the trashier tabloid shows like Hard Copy...

...Local news as we know it was invented in 1970, the brainchild of a marketing research whiz hired by the industry to raise ratings by finding out what audiences "wanted to see...

...Charities, celebrations, instances of extraordinary good luck or good works by or for local residents are ever-present on local newscasts...

...And let us in on the latest bargain to seek out or scam to avoid...

...Sociologist Joshua Gamson has suggested, in an insightful essay, that there is a lesson to be learned from the enormous popularity of tabloid television—a category in which I would certainly include local news...

...And it's especially interesting when they die in bizarre or inhuman situations, when their loved ones are on camera to moan and wail, when a lot of them die at once...

...I am not suggesting that the news should not feature community residents' views and experiences...

...And when the crisis affects them directly—a school budget cut or neighborhood hospital closing, for example—their on-air responses are equally vapid...

...In my urban neighborhood, parents warn children never to make eye contact with anyone on the street or subway...

...And it worked...

...And why shouldn't they...

...But we're forgetting that this is not the question to ask...

...But the local news teams' way of presenting such community responses is deliberately demeaning and fatuous...

...The researchers offered a limited, embarrassingly vapid list of choices of formats and subjects, while ignoring the possibility that different groups might want different kinds of information and analysis...

...No, no...

...Nor was it a concern to respect the audience's intelligence or diversity...

...We don't open the door to them for fear they will shoot us or rape us...

...If it bleeds, it leads is the motto of the commercial news industry and local news...

...They seem to care endlessly for each other and us...

...Of course it should...

...They are getting, for a brief moment, a Utopian fantasy of a better, kinder, more decent and meaningful world than the one that entraps them...

...But if we can't all dream of moving to sunny California anymore, there's always TV, where something resembling that innocent dream still exists...

...They find precious little of those things in the streets and buildings they traverse and inhabit in their daily lives...

...Ooh," they sigh, at news of earthquakes and plane crashes, far and near...

...headlines...

...When wars are declared or covered, when elections are won or lost, when federal budgets and plant closings do away with jobs and services or threaten to put more and more of us in jail, for less and less cause, the local news teams are there to calm our jagged nerves and reassure us that we needn't worry...

...And joke around...

...In fact, the "Action Line" and "Shame on You" features, in which reporters hang out at local shopping centers trying out new gadgets, testing fabrics, and trapping shady shopkeepers in their nefarious efforts to sell us junk, poison, and instant death, are among the most popular and cheery things on the air...

...And so we have the always smiling, always sympathetic, always confidently upbeat news teams to sugar-coat the bad news...

...I don't know what we're going to do without any teachers or books," they say with puzzled, frenzied expressions as they try desperately to articulate some coherent reply to a complex issue they've just heard about...

...Historically, after all, the weather is the standard small-talk item for people wishing to be pleasant and make contact without getting into anything controversial or heavy...

...But that was then and this is now...

...If local news is meant to be a facsimile of a sunny Dis-neyesque community of happy, cozy campers, in which the bothersome bad guys and events of the day are quickly dealt with so that community harmony may once more reign, at least for the moment—and that is the intended fantasy— then what better, safer, kind of information than weather reports...

...It is the only kind of news we can all share in—no matter what our race, class, gender, or political differences—as members of a common community...

...Don Henley, again, said it best some twenty years ago: "Call some place paradise/ Kiss it good-bye...

...No one could say much worth saying in such a format...

...And if someone managed to come up with something serious and intelligent, rest assured it would be cut in favor of a more sensational, emotional response...

...Its endless series of fires, shootouts, collapsing buildings, and babies beaten or abandoned or bitten by wild dogs is the state-of-the-art showcase for the industry...

...But even local issues of serious import are given short shrift on these newscasts...

...Every day, in the midst of even the most dreadful and depressing news, there are legions of friends and neighbors to mourn and console each other, offering aid, bringing soup and casseroles to the victims of natural and man-made disasters, stringing lights and hanging balloons for festive neighborhood gatherings...

...The news teams themselves often play this role for us...

...never to speak to anyone, even in case of tragedy or emergency...

...What people are getting from local newscasts—and here the researchers were right on the money, literally—is indeed what they want, in the most profound and sad sense of that phrase...

...They do want comfort, reassurance, and a community where they belong and feel safe...

...The game was rigged from the start...

...Here's Goofy Gil with the weather, or Snappy Sam with the sports—the two features which, on every local newscast, are given the longest time slots and the most elaborate and expensive props...

...For it is, says Gamson, "Only when people perceive public life as inconsequential, as not their own, [that] they readily accept the invitation to turn news into play...

...But real news, even about cats in trees or babies in wells, is hardly what takes up the most airtime...

...Everything else comes from the networks...

...in the days of black-and-white movies and Read All About It...

...The news teams bring us word of our nice friends and neighbors, the celebrities we have come to know and love through their ever-present images on the TV screens that have become our virtual homes and communities...

...They are not trained in journalism...

...Indeed, this kind of "good news" is another staple of the genre...