Before the mass media people would read the paper to catch up on what happened in the previous week and month. If the local hardware store burned down, they might see the smoke, or get the news from their neighbour Fred: “Hey, did you hear, Clarke Hardware burned to the ground last night?” Occasionally, they would tune up the Philco and listen to the radio news, if they had a station within listening range that gave news any more than a cursory nod. Television reassured the viewer that the world still existed in a fifteen minute talking head program that you observed, but never really looked at.
Our generation realizes that what is presented as ‘news’ is slanted in too many ways to count. It isn’t limited to political slant, as there have been political newspapers for centuries. Ideally, news would be the first draft of the history textbooks, with the least coloration possible, but it doesn’t work that way. For instance, the essential news slant for the media of television are pictures that are striking, compelling, emotional and available, with the emphasis on available. If there are no pictures, then the item is a talking head and might as well be dead on arrival.
I’ll give you an example: The Gulf War I coverage of John Holliman, Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett on CNN, from their hotel room in Baghdad. The second is the Camp David accords, signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978. One was a landmark geopolitical healing of ancient wounds. One was a bombing run phoned in with occasional video snippets. One story had night scope camera footage. One had a picture of three world leaders shaking hands. Which one do you remember? Of course you remember the Gulf War stuff. In the grand scheme of things, the Camp David accords are much more important that bombing Baghdad.
The news is full of the Middle East right now. Networks have their meat puppets on the ground looking all stern and frowny. If one were to go by TV news, it would seem that everyone in Iraq has dropped tools and is watching a “Dynasty” rerun on TV. Peace has suddenly broken out in the Korean peninsula. This is the normal course of media events in our world and Marshall McLuhan would be doing his happy dance, if he were still alive.
News networks don’t like stories without good pictures. Karl Rove coming out of a courtroom is not a picture. Dubya signing a bill is not a picture. A 105 mm artillery piece going off is a picture. A dweeby looking American student lined up in Beirut to get on a helicopter in the US embassy courtyard is a picture. Even better is an interview with the student and a follow up interview of the student’s parents from Buttscrape New Jersey. Naturally, shots of artillery-devastated urban landscapes are really good pictures, along with frenzied crowds screaming in a foreign language. Destroyed cityscapes and limp, bloody bundles in blankets are even more fabulous to the news desk.
There is the problem. News is gathered for the most sensational pictures that will lead to higher ratings and more advertising revenue for the news outlet. Newspapers have played the circulation game since a week after Gutenberg figured moveable type was fun. The internet is a huge news pipe. The blogosphere, with big quotation marks around the word “news”, even more so. We have forgotten that the idea of news is to give people information that will allow them to exist in their reality. Or, at least that was the original intent behind news.
I was in Seattle last week at a corporate convention. On Friday afternoon last week, a bent and twisted fellow walked into the Jewish Federation in downtown Seattle and shot six people. I was about five blocks away, in my hotel room, when I heard a few too many sirens and the constant whomp of a helicopter hovering over a building a few blocks away. Both those things twigged me that something was amiss. I turned on the tube and live from the helicopter I could see from my hotel room, was a shot of people running out of the Jewish Federation and hot-footing it to the police lines.
Moments later the suspect came out of the building and lay down for handcuffing. That particular clip, shot from a helicopter 500 feet over the scene, was played at least forty-five times in the next hour. I counted.
Interspersed between replays of the arrest, were ground level shots of fire, ambulance and more police vehicles rolling up to the roadblocks. There was the occasionally breathless reporter telling me that there had been an arrest and the suspect had been taken away. I figured that one out the first time I saw the clip of him being cuffed. But, no, I had to be told it several dozen times.
Along with endless repetition, I got to hear some truly wild speculation, that there was a bomb in the building, there was another shooter, there was a team of shooters, it was a Hezbollah attack, it was a deranged individual and so on. The reporters didn’t bother to follow even the most rudimentary research rules. They just heard some wild-ass comment from a passer-by and reported it as an ‘unconfirmed report’ live from the scene. Bouncing between the three local stations, each was striving mightily to bring the viewers as much data as possible, each trying to get cameras closer, or to be the first to report the more outlandish of claims.
Eventually, after the police and fire departments held press conferences, did the three local stations settle on the bare bones of the actual story: Nutjob with grudge against Jews decided to pop a bunch of folks at the Jewish Federation offices to protest the usual Israel-World Zionist rap with two parts Pan Arabic Islamic Jihadist crap. No bombs, no gas, no other shooter, no WMD, no other parts to the story, except one dead and five wounded. Play that helicopter clip of the arrest for the forty-sixth time.
This is where we have to be intelligent consumers of information. Know that the electronic media needs pictures and will juggle the news lineup to fit the pictures, not necessarily the news value of the item. If I see a news report that says something truly outrageous, I want to see corroboration by some kind of mainstream news outlet, like Reuters, AP, Canadian Press or the BBC. Not that those outlets are impartial or unbiased, but at least they know where unbiased and impartial are located in the dictionary.
What it comes down to is media literacy. A wise consumer of ‘news and information’ should have one eyebrow perpetually raised in question of the veracity of the story being told: News is supposed to be the first draft of history, but too often the media itself skews the needs of the media to the story.
RoadDave 