Entries Tagged 'TeeVee' ↓

Television is virtually a news-free zone—quick! how many TV programs can you name that tell you, with facts and figures and no spin or attitude, who, what, why, where, and when? huh? how many?—and yet supposedly sophisticated TV critics, like the NYT’s Alessandra Stanley, still refer to something called “cable news.”

The funniest thing about it, though, is that Stanley calls it “news” while describing it, essentially, as an unprecedented media and campaign clusterfuck [e.a.]:

The distinction of all three new hourlong programs is that the hosts are not the stars, the campaign is. Speeches, interviews, surrogate gaffes, opinion polls, delegate math and even party deliberations are showcased with the same swooshing sound effects and flashy graphics that tip viewers to an appearance by George Clooney on “Live With Regis and Kelly.”

It’s a marked change for cable news, which over the last few years has followed the lead of Fox News and promoted vividly opinionated hosts who shape the news flow to suit their own personas and pet peeves. It’s also refreshing …

I wouldn’t call it refreshing. I would call it over-the-top infotainment. But Stanley has got one thing right—it’s the campaigns that are the stars of these shows, and the folks running the campaigns understand the circus atmosphere that is today’s media world (much more so than does Alessandra Stanley. That’s why they’ve got their candidates doing the Ellen show, etc.

This kind of coverage is also, as Stanley points out, a ratings boon for the cable shows:

The public has not been this passionately absorbed in an election in decades, and the candidates are passionately intent on making their case on television. When they do, viewership goes up: it’s a boon for the 24-hour news channels, but even they are hard-pressed to keep up with the constant flow of debates, photo ops, tarmac tirades, so many words spoken and misspoken and so many talk-show appearances.

The candidates show up not just on “Meet the Press” or “60 Minutes,” but also on “Saturday Night Live” (Senator John McCain’s star turn dates back to 2002). More recently, Senator Barack Obama kissed and cuddled the ladies of “The View,” Mr. McCain traded insults with David Letterman on his “Late Show,” and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton joked about dodging sniper fire to arrive at “The Tonight Show” on time for Jay Leno. Mrs. Clinton is also scheduled to appear on “Ellen” on Monday, her first appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show since Mr. Obama’s last one. (In that appearance, Mr. Obama upped the ante by dancing for her — his second effort to, as he put it, “bust a move.”)

And the cycle is endless and self-sustaining: satirical shows like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “Saturday Night Live” take clips from the news and make fun of them; news programs take skits from “Saturday Night Live” and replay them.

Andrew Tyndall writes about this campaign—and the TV coverage—much more perceptively over at HuffPo. He says the Horse Race has given over to a Gameshow Reality contest:

Stop thinking of this election as a race to the wire to be won by the candidate with the finest pedigree, truest form and best connections. Start thinking of it as a cast of larger-than-life characters, scheming against each other while simultaneously trying to appear attractive to the electorate audience. Week by week the group undergoes media trials such as candidate debates and Sunday morning interviews. Each primary election constitutes another potential elimination round.

The winner gets to be a constant television presence in our homes for four years.

With open contests in both parties, this Presidential cycle offered the perfect opportunity to unveil this new method of coverage. The casting of the contestants could not have been better. In one tribe, as they say on Survivor, there was a handsome Mormon businessman, a colorful big city mayor, a slimmed-down Baptist minister and a crusty war hero. The other tribe had a self-made trial lawyer, a globetrotting Hispanic diplomat, a diligent feminist with that interesting celebrity marriage and an inspirational young African-American.

That’s infotainment! It rules!

One day perhaps the captains of the various media industries (old and new) will understand their vast power to shape public opinion among the ignorant, distraction-loving, and narrative-seeking masses [e.a.].

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

It’s always been like that, you say. What does it matter? you ask.

It matters because this ignorance can be easily leveraged through the myriad new forms of political propaganda that the Age of Technology has ushered in and unleashed.

It matters because unless we educate people (in an engaging way, not only in a boring PBS or NPR way) in their common humanity rather than pander to their tribal instincts, we are moving backward, not forward.

It means a new era of wars, not “post-partisan politics.”

————
*** Do I really have to remind you that infotainment rules?

Caitlin Flanagan, who reports that she watched Katie in the morning on the Today show for years, explains why Couric is such a disaster on the CBS Evening News [e.a.]

As everyone acknowledges, the old folks and aging Boomers who tune in at 6:30 for a half hour of headlines and human-interest stories aren’t looking for the news, but a performance of the news. (Bob Schieffer was more successful than Katie, not in spite of looking like one of the old guys down at the VA, but because of it.) Choosing an anchor isn’t a journalistic decision; it’s a casting choice. And this one was abysmal. Flop sweat and panic surrounded the broadcast almost immediately. In a move typical of television, the first things the bosses tried to change about Katie were the very things that had led them to hire her: the bubbly personality, the killer clothes, the playfulness. Now she had to sit quietly at her desk like a girl being punished. She acquired a passel of one-color blazers that looked like rejects from last year’s Thrifty Rent-a-Car collection. By now, she has all but disappeared.

Wait. There’s more:

Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail—and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon. Because Katie remembered the old world, the one in which the most-respected news was broadcast at the end of the day, she thought that she was taking a more powerful job. But the Today show —broadcast for four hours a day, a forum for interviews with many of the top newsmakers of the day, as well as for the kind of lifestyle-trend stories it pioneered and that have come to play such a big part in the nightly news—is a far more culturally significant program. One reason that this huge star didn’t have a tell-all biography written about her until now is that while she was at Today, no publisher wanted to antagonize her; a booking on the show was every new author’s dream. The release of Klein’s splashy book, then, is evidence not of Katie’s elevation, but of its opposite. She made the kind of mistake that women a generation younger than hers probably wouldn’t have. She spent her time gunning for a position that had been drained of its status and importance long before she got there. And what she has learned, the hard way, is that her climb to the top has been not a triumph but the act of someone who slept through a revolution.

Interesting stuff. It all seems to come down to what the audience expects from television—and that itself appears to have changed, along with viewing habits, as anecdotal evidence suggests and as a variety of writers have noted.

The NYT’s David Carr delivers grim news to “creatives”:

I’ve got some bad news for striking Hollywood writers: Election 2008 is a breakaway hit.

January was supposed to be the month when the writers’ strike took its toll, subjecting viewers to a menu of desiccated repeats and cheesy reality shows. Instead, the primary season is serving as the backdrop for one of the most compelling runs of event television in years, creating the kind of chatter network marketers would kill for and spectacular ratings for cable news.

Carr repeatedly tries to suggest that it’s the absence of appealing alternatives (like sports, late-night comedy, and scripted shows, for example) that accounts for the huge gains in audience numbers for “cable news” since 2004.

The Times’s Bill Keller disagrees:

“I think the level of interest in the presidential race would be intense even if writers were still churning out episodes of ‘24’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” he wrote. “It’s a defining race for both parties, with a cast of fascinating candidates, some of whom fall into the breakthrough category. There also seems to be a visceral national yearning to turn the page.”

Perhaps. But I’m more inclined to accept the explanation of Brian Grazer, who is not a gazillionaire producer for nothing [e.a.]:

“There is a new episode on almost every night,” said Brian Grazer, a Hollywood producer who is in what is left of the Oscar hunt with “American Gangster.” “It is very human to be constantly searching for new stories, and now that the traditional outlets of those stories are shutting down, people are finding their drama in these unfolding events.”

So, yes, I agree with Grazer and with Keller. But neither one of them will come out and say the bleeding obvious: that it is the manner of coverage of politics that is drawing in the audiences. The “drama” is being manufactured by the cable “news” networks. (In this case, it is helped along by the wide-open nature of the political race, but that only makes it easier for the networks to churn out stories with unpredictable endings.)

It is not news. It is infotainment—in other words, information (none of which is necessarily true) packaged as entertainment.  

Now do you believe me when I say that Infotainment Rules? Here’s what I wrote:

Television, however, delivers what sells, and what sells is entertainment—or stuff that is packaged like entertainment. Infotainment doesn’t have to be bad or stupid or crass. High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.

Once again: I do not endorse the hideous devolution of TV “news” into infotainment. I am merely trying to get people to understand that what they’re getting on TV is not “news.” It’s entertainment, and the goal of its producers is to get you to watch their channel.

They do it by hooking you on stories. If the stories are exciting and the ending isn’t known to anyone in advance (as in an election, or a sensational kidnapping, or some violent flare-up somewhere, for example), people tune in. That’s why cable “news” is addicted to horse-race coverage of the U.S. election that is ten months away and can barely turn away to give any attention to the visit of our president to the Middle East.

If you want to know the news, take advantage of the vast amount of information available on the Internet and read widely.

If you want fictional rather than reality-based (and reality-bending) entertainment on TV and you want our political process to be a little more serious and less unseemly … I don’t know how to advise you. All I do is call ‘em how I see ‘em.

This morning on BBC World, we were told about the latest in German reality television: Death TV. Watch the report here.

Michele Hartley explains that it’s undertakers who are behind this ghoulish, um, undertaking:

As if television isn’t depressing enough, starting in 2008, you can watch the death channel in Germany. Etos-TV, a new German channel which will start broadcasting in 2008, is devoted to death. The channel will feature documentaries on cemeteries and burials and other issues dealing with death. Additionally, you can spend your day viewing obituaries.

For people that have lost loved ones a photo and written obituary costs about 2,000 euros a photo for ten spots, and for a little more money, videos of the deceased and spoken narrative can be broadcast. Etos-TV calls itself the “neue Trauerkanel” (the new sad channel) and sees the new channel as a new vehicle for the undertakers of Germany to reach the public as well as capitalizing on the close to a million deaths a year in the country due to the aging population. It does make a for a nice tribute to loved ones and people have the added advantage of being able to put the tribute on the Internet once it has aired. For my money, it’s a bit more reality than I care to deal with.

“Everone is entitled to an obituary,” says one of the guys interviewed in the BBC piece.

Indeed.

I’ve been re-reading Daniel Boorstin’s classic 1961 work of social criticism The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (which is extraordinarily fresh and insightful for a 45-year-old book, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day).

Underlying Boorstin’s thesis of a mid-twentieth-century American populace transfixed by images is his notion that advertising—or any kind of marketing—succeeds by holding up a mirror to potential customers and offering them an enticing, image of themselves (more on this another day, but let’s just say for now that advertising is about fantasy-fulfillment).

Now, along comes the NYT’s Elisabetta Povoledo to tell us that Italians are transfixed by a six-part TV biopic, “The Boss of Bosses,” because the mirror it holds up to its audience shows a somewhat less than flattering image of itself [e.a.]:

“Italy has always been fascinated by the Mafia, by its personification of evil,” [a reporter] said in a phone interview.

Another possible explanation for the popularity of “Il Capo dei Capi” may be that it goes beyond mere storytelling and puts Italy in front of an unflattering — if engrossing — mirror of itself. It suggests that if Mr. Riina became the most formidable and feared mobster in Italian history, it was thanks to the collusion of political and economic forces at various levels of Italian society.

“It’s not fiction — it’s a real story that tells 50 years of Italian history, and it names names,” said Pietro Valsecchi, who produced the series. “It tells us just what sort of country we have been living in, it shows us the complicity of the state, it puts the Mafia in our face.”

There’s some evidence for the notion that its roots in reality drive the popularity of the series:

“The Sopranos,” the HBO drama about Italian-American bad guys, never caught on here.

The producer gets the last word [e.a.]:

Fictionalizing reality may be the best way to educate Italy’s distracted audience, Mr. Valsecchi said. “Italians don’t read newspapers — they barely glance at headlines. But here they’re getting the full story, with all its implications.”

Well, he gets the next-to-last word. I get the last word, which is a minor amendment to Mr. Valsecchi’s proposition: Fictionalizing reality is a way to infotain an audience—that is, to capture its attention. But let’s not get carried away. That is different from educating the audience.

A little while back, NYT film critic Manohla Dargis, writing about her earliest passions, explained (without intending to) why most of us are not addicted to, say, PBS’s NewsHour and NPR but rather to, say, the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and Countdown with Keith Olbermann—that is to say: we’re drawn to infotainment rather than “the news.”

It has to do with the human need to let our imaginations roam free with the aid of storytelling:

… Comic-Con [is] where people can give physical form to the passions that the rest of the year remain safely hidden from the cruel world. This is where you let your freak flag fly without getting beaten up by the playground bullies. …

I never became a comic book geek; then, as now, I got my fix from watching movies. [e.a.]

Whatever form of narrative we’re addicted to, we all need our fixes. We are all suckers for a good story. Marketers of all stripes, marketers of everything—from Viagra to the iPhone to the Iraq war to the Bourne Ultimatum to jihad to celebrity gossip—take advantage of our love of spectacle and our desire to suspend disbelief and our need to abandon ourselves to the pleasure and pain of feeling for someone else so that we will be alleviated, if for just a little while, of the burden of being ourselves.

When it comes to TV, the news as a narrative form just doesn’t do it for people; sensational storytelling—infotainment—does.

Will Joe Scarborough officially become Morning Joe? How long will Dan Abrams be able to do double duty as host of a one-hour program and general manager of MSNBC?

When will the preening, hideously arrogant not-team-player John Roberts get the boot from CNN, where he manages to step on everyone's lines and toes? (They have edited the transcript *** to remove the offending words, but this morning he was so eager-beaver to report a trend and to show off his superior but irrelevant knowledge that he made Christiane Amanpour cringe when he lumped in Syria's Assad, who happens to be an ophtalmologist, with the medical-professional terrorists responsible for the latest British terror incidents. She said pointedly [I'm paraphrasing]: "Let's leave Assad out of this one."])

On Hamas TV, who will replace Farfur, the Mickey Mouse lookalike, now that the character was killed off—as in "martyred"—for Palestinian children's viewing pleasure?

The Hamas-affiliated al-Aqsa channel aired the last episode on Friday, showing the character, Farfur, being beaten to death by an "Israeli agent".

"Farfur was martyred defending his land," said the show's presenter Saraa. …

In the final broadcast an actor said to be an Israeli agent tries to buy the land of the squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse lookalike.

Farfur brands the Israeli a "terrorist" and is beaten to death.

Sheesh—even Tony Soprano got a reprieve. I guess there's no Palestinian David Chase.

———–

*** This is what's left in the transcript of the chat between Roberts and Amanpour this morning:

ROBERTS: Hey, thanks, Kiran. And good morning to you.

We've been following breaking news all morning long here in London. Seven suspects now in custody, and CNN is reporting that two of the suspects, the ones who smashed that vehicle into the Glasgow airport on Saturday afternoon, appear to have been the same ones who planted the bombs which failed to go off here in London on Friday.

Joining me now with more on all of this is our chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour.

And Christiane, are we learning, even though we don't know the names and police aren't telling us about that or their nationalities, are we learning anything more about these suspects?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, basically two more, according to police in Glasgow, have been arrested. They are 20 and 25 years old, according to one wire report. That brings, as far as we know, seven people in custody.

According to our Paula Newton at Scotland Yard, at least two of those who were in custody are medical workers, one of which may have been a medical doctor actually practicing here. So, implying that one of the lines of inquiry the police are following is that this could be some kind of network of medical professionals, which is extremely unusual.

ROBERTS: Is this something that we've never heard of before?

AMANPOUR: I don't recall it. You've been reporting, and we know that the Ayman al-Zawahiri, the godfather of al Qaeda, is a doctor, but I don't recall such a focus being put on a group of specifically medical professionals in some kind of terrorist attack like this.

ROBERTS: Do we know anything about nationalities? Yesterday police in Scotland were very firm in saying they are not Scottish.

AMANPOUR: Yes. And others have said they're not homegrown. In other words, maybe they're not British at all.

What we've been hearing — and again, the police are very careful not to — they're just not telling us about nationalities at the moment. But the buzz has been that they are of some kind of varied Middle Eastern origin. And right now I'm trying to track down one floating piece of information in the atmosphere about one of them who was arrested on the motorway yesterday who may, in fact, be a doctor from a specific country in which I'm trying now to track that down.

ROBERTS: Let me ask you this question. Why are British officials so tight-lipped with this information? In the United States we would have learned a lot about these suspects by now.

AMANPOUR: Well, I guess it's ongoing, their investigation. They don't want to prejudice — and the laws here are a little bit different in terms of public disclosure than they are in the U.S., even in court cases and trials.

ROBERTS: All right. Well, we do hope to hear more about them.