Okay, I’m not that young any more, but I am still in the coveted 18-34 demographic. And I’m a little disturbed by many of
these suggestions in today’s New York Times about how CBS should remodel its evening news.
According to the consensus presented here, the evening news as it currently stands is like your grandfather: sure, he has authority, but he’s a little smelly, often somewhat embarrassing, and you really don’t want to be seen with him in public. The new CBS evening news should be like one of your hipster buddies. Not actually one of your good friends, but that hyper ironic guy in the bar who nevertheless is surprisingly well-informed.
Those interviewed include the co-creator of the Daily Show, the founder of “60 Minutes”, the creator of “Survivor” and the utter fuckwit who first came up with the template for local TV news. Fucking yay. I guess out of all of them Mark Burnett, the creator of “Survivor”, should most be trusted with the new evening newscast. After all, he says that “of all the people you’re likely to speak to, I’m the most likely to get it right - because I have my finger on the pulse of a lot of young people.” Hey asshole! Get your fingure off my pulse! Oh, wait, I’m not that young any more.
All of the criticisms of the current evening news genre focus on the shortcomings of its authoritarian “voice of God” anchor format. Suggestions range from panels of people reading blogs to podcasting to Oprah.
Now lest I seem like a throwback to a former age, doesn’t the evening news need less emphasis on personality and celebrity, rather than more? What most struck me about US network television news when I first encountered it was precisely that it centered so much around some dude (and it usually was a dude), be it Jennings or Brokaw or Rather. And that because of that, the news lacked, well, authority. The newscaster was supposed to be “trusted”, someone we could turn to to filter the world for us. The criticisms of this presented in the Times article head over the cliff in precisely the wrong direction: it’s the authority that is seen as bad, not the personality. They suggest more and better personalities, whether reading from blogs or getting thrown out of the White House or ironically analyzing the day’s cable news coverage.
Shouldn’t the evening news have much less emphasis on whoever is hosting it and more emphasis on giving us, well, the news? You know: well-funded news bureaus, granted a siginificant measure of independence from the network’s corporate hierarchy (and corporate owners), with a premium placed on international coverage and a domestic ethos of cutting through the press releases and general bullshit. So that the emphasis is on, like, content rather than a surfeit of human interest stories, content which takes precedence over whoever the person reading the news happens to be.
Given the steady stream of 24 hour babble coming from the cable news networks, you’d think there’d be room for a daily thirty minutes of concise, solid news coverage. Coverage that is less like the cable networks, not more. That focuses neither on an anchor nor on a charismatic host (or group of hosts). That, perhaps, actually informs people, so that when surprising and shocking things happen either at home or overseas they don’t appear to come the fuck out of nowhere. So that perhaps the network-watching public has a sense that large, catastrophic events have non-catastrophic, long-term causes of which they might already have some sort of inkling. Because yes, the stakes really are that high.
Oh, but I forgot. As I’m under 50 my brain is completely incapable of dealing with complex concepts and long-term causation. I want explosions and zany graphics and cameras zipping around at crazy angles. My mistake.
Posted by B. W. Ventril in Rants
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
