Ted Koppel's post-"Nightline" career has barely started, and already it's shaping up to be as valuable as the one he left behind. At the Television Critics' Association press tour in Pasadena this month, where Koppel and ex-"Nightline" producer Tom Bettag promoted Koppel's deal to make stand-alone documentaries for Discovery Channel, the longtime ABC newsman sloughed off the network-imposed vow of silence he'd taken for years and talked shop, affording the rest of us an intriguing glimpse of hard TV news realities as seen from the inside. (For an account of Koppel and Bettag's comments, click here and scroll all the way to the bottom.)
As it turns out, that appearance was sort of a preview of Koppel's other new role as a Sunday columnist for the New York Times, which began today. I'm not aware of any promise by Koppel to focus his column on TV news exclusively, but wouldn't object if he did; his first column, titled "And Now, a Word for Our Demographic," paints a portrait of TV news' confusions and weaknesses that you have probably read elsewhere, but with a sense of first-person professional authority that's badly needed right now.
If you'd like to know how TV news went from bad to worse to surreally awful in the space of just a few years, you owe it to yourself to read this piece. Among other things, Koppel writes that although the most "common criticism" of TV newspeople was that they operated "on a lowest-common-denominator basis," things really were a tiny bit better ten or twenty years ago "when the Federal Communications Commission was still perceived to have teeth," and people who think so aren't just nostalgically envisioning a golden era that never existed.
Pre-cable and before the evisceration of the FCC, news divisions were loss leaders that "occasionally came under political pressures but rarely commercial ones," Koppel writes. "The expectation was that they would search out issues of importance, sift out the trivial and then tell the public what it needed to know."
Now, thanks to an increase in the number of news outlets and resultant "dictatorship of the demographic," network news divisions, like their cable rivals, are "expected to turn a profit" and are correspondingly vulnerable to focus group-driven tinkering. That means more celebrity-obsessed tidbits, more just-for-the-bloody-hell-of-it reporting on murders and disappearances, more propagandistic commentary in the place of news (O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann) and more touchy-feely showboating masquerading as news (Anderson Cooper).
The most chilling and moving part of Koppel's piece comes near the end, when he talks about the systematic dismantling of international news reporting as a means of keeping costs down and giving the American audience, which has rarely been interested in anything taking place outside the USA, the news it wants, as opposed to the news it needs.
Sadly, Koppel's observations were published on the very day that Koppel's former colleague, "World News Tonight" coanchor Bob Woodruff, had been seriously hurt in Iraq by an improvised explosive device.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
The news you need
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4 comments:
Koppel's op-ed was great and followed along similar lines that Aaron Brown gave in a speech in Florida earlier in the week (link to it at http://edwardcopeland.blogspot.com/2006/01/anderson-cooper-180-part-two.html if you haven't seen it). Television news has always been depressing but it has come to the point now that it is barely watchable. TV would rather gloss over the big issues to focus on the latest missing blonde or the James Frey controversy. It seems to me deeper than just a search for ratings or the right demographic, but reflects a laziness on television news. If you watch people like Katie Couric just regurgitate talking points without actually checking things out for themselves, it's depressing. Now, the mainstream media seems out on a tear against bloggers. While there certainly is excess out there, this week a blogger led The Washington Post and L.A. Times to report on White House hypocrisy on the FISA court issue. Another online magazine gave a detail account of how Jack Abramoff actually steered donations away from Dems, but I haven't seen any of the mainstream press pick up on that one.
When I complained about Anderson Cooper not too long ago, a friend of mine pointed out that how he once viewed movies like Network and Broadcast News as exaggerations, now he finds them frighteningly prophetic.
Frankly, the unrelenting aggressiveness and originality of the best bloggers is what inspired me to take the leap. The really good ones -- the ones who dig up their own stuff or highlight an issue in a forceful, fresh way that causes you to revaluate what you think you know -- are true citizen journalists. They take journalism as seriously as any professional, and a lot o them don't get paid or barely get paid.
What really gets me about TV news, particularly cable news, is the Cool Whip insubstantiality of a lot of it. They talk about the news rather than really analyzing it, and too much of the talk consists of the same boring right wing/center left conflict (you never see any real leftists on TV). And entirely too much TV news seems geared toward making people angry or depressed so that they can feel they've experienced some sort of "catharsis."
The Walter Cronkite/David Brinkley/Tom Brokaw/Peter Jennings continuum of TV news might have been contrived and artificial in its own way, but at least it told people that the news was a serious business, that they were expected to care about stuff they weren't already predisposed to be interested in, and that knowing just a little bit about the world was part of their responsibility as citizens of the United States.
One other thing that I didn't mention is how the effects of TV and the chasing of the young demographic is corrupting newspapers as well. Many will take any chance to take a local person who has become a national name and put him or her on the cover because circulation and marketing believes it sparks more street sales. Of course, they don't want to talk about how on the days they aren't on the cover, the street sales go down. Chasing this young demographic seems a futile pursuit now. Except for news junkies, the young have never had much interest in newspapers and in the age of the Internet, even those kids won't have much interest. Newspapers should pursue older readers -- the one with more disposable income and with driveways in which they can actually receive the paper. Still, even that is going away because as newspapers aim to be more like TV, their stories get briefer and briefer and the important details and context get lost.
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