John Hockenberry, former Dateline correspondent, describes in the MIT Technology Review how the networks’ preoccupation with hanging on to their viewers has gotten in the way of reporting news. News programs, at least as exemplified by NBC, where Hockenberry once worked, go to considerable lengths to find affirming emotional narratives and avoid upsetting or challenging the public.
The entire article, “You Don’t Understand Our Audience,” is very much worth reading. Below I’ve excerpted some background and a key incident:
“This is London”
When Edward R. Murrow calmly said those words into a broadcast microphone during the London Blitz at the beginning of World War II, he generated an analog signal that was amplified, sent through a transatlantic cable, and relayed to transmitters that delivered his voice into millions of homes. Broadcast technology itself delivered a world-changing cultural message to a nation well convinced by George Washington’s injunction to resist foreign “entanglements.” Hearing Murrow’s voice made Americans understand that Europe was close by, and so were its wars. Two years later, the United States entered World War II, and for a generation, broadcast technology would take Americans ever deeper into the battlefield, and even onto the surface of the moon. Communication technologies transformed America’s view of itself, its politics, and its culture.
One might have thought that the television industry, with its history of rapid adaptation to technological change, would have become a center of innovation for the next radical transformation in communication. It did not. Nor did the ability to transmit pictures, voices, and stories from around the world to living rooms in the U.S. heartland produce a nation that is more sophisticated about global affairs. Instead, the United States is arguably more isolated and less educated about the world than it was a half-century ago. In a time of such broad technological change, how can this possibly be the case?…..
Normally I spent little time near NBC executives, but here I was at the center of power, and I felt slightly flushed at how much I coveted the sudden proximity. Something about [NBC group president Jeff] Zucker’s physical presence and bluster made him seem like a toy action figure from The Simpsons or The Sopranos. I imagined that he could go back to his office and pull mysterious levers that opened the floodgates to pent-up advertisements and beam them to millions of households. Realistically, though, here was a man who had benefited from the timing of September 11 and also had the power to make it go away. In a cheap sort of way it was delirious to be in his presence.
At the moment Zucker blew in and interrupted, I had been in Corvo’s office to propose a series of stories about al-Qaeda, which was just emerging as a suspect in the attacks. While well known in security circles and among journalists who tried to cover international Islamist movements, al-Qaeda as a terrorist organization and a story line was still obscure in the early days after September 11. It had occurred to me and a number of other journalists that a core mission of NBC News would now be to explain, even belatedly, the origins and significance of these organizations. But Zucker insisted that Dateline stay focused on the firefighters. The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. [Dateline executive producer David] Corvo enthusiastically agreed. “Maybe,” said Zucker, “we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters.” He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.
With that, Zucker rushed back to his own office, many floors above Dateline’s humble altitude. My meeting with Corvo was basically over. He did ask me what I thought about Zucker’s idea for a reality show about firefighters. I told him that we would have to figure a way around the fact that most of the time very little actually happens in firehouses. He nodded and muttered something about seeking a lot of “back stories” to maintain an emotional narrative. A few weeks later, a half-dozen producers were assigned to find firehouses and produce long-form documentaries about America’s rediscovered heroes. Perhaps two of these programs ever aired; the whole project was shelved very soon after it started. Producers discovered that unlike September 11, most days featured no massive terrorist attacks that sent thousands of firefighters to their trucks and hundreds to tragic, heroic deaths. On most days nothing happened in firehouses whatsoever.
This was one in a series of lessons I learned about how television news had lost its most basic journalistic instincts in its search for the audience-driven sweet spot, the “emotional center” of the American people. Gone was the mission of using technology to veer out onto the edge of American understanding in order to introduce something fundamentally new into the national debate. The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone’s lost kitty.
It also explains why TV news seems so archaic next to the advertising and entertainment content on the same networks. Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns….
Entertainment programs often took on issues that would never fly on Dateline. On a Thursday night, ER could do a story line on the medically uninsured, but a night later, such a “downer policy story” was a much harder sell. In the time I was at NBC, you were more likely to hear federal agriculture policy discussed on The West Wing, or even on Jon Stewart, than you were to see it reported in any depth on Dateline.
Some of the efforts to avoid unpleasant stories are simply surreal.
The piece continues here.
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One word: Soma
Mind you, the knee-jerk silliness of journalists isn’t impressive either. Consider “he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine”. But al-Q weren’t raging about Palestine: their beef was that they wanted US troops out of Saudi Arabia and they wanted to re-establish the Caliphate. They only started up about Palestine once they realised that that was what Western reporters wanted to hear about. So I understand, anyway: does anyone have contrary evidence?
Here’s the key quote:
“It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn.”
Who was it who said we get the government we deserve? We get the journalism we deserve (demand) as well.
One could argue that the Reagan Era, the Reagan movement, was a public reaction against televised coverage of the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, with all their troubling implications. Reagan told Americans that America was good, that they were good, and they had no need to feel guilty or make any significant reassessments of their country or themselves and their way of life.
We are still living in the Reagan era. Most of our politicians in both parties are still afraid to wander too far from that “America as City on a Hill” narrative that Reagan turned into a national dogma. The television news networks share that fear.
darlene,
Good point, and one that is frequently lost. Similarly, Osama bin Laden is stereotyped here as being “against freedom” when he is primarily opposed to US military presence and influence over domestic affairs.