Entries Tagged 'TV news' ↓

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.

NBC is flooding the zone, synergistically:

If the NBC Nightly News series “The Secret to Her Success,” produced in partnership with iVillage, seemed like a transplant from the newly installed estrogen-fueled fourth hour of Today, anchor Brian Williams says it’s simply a coincidence. …

Throughout the week the series — which could have been ripped from the pages of Good Housekeeping or Redbook — has focused on female-centric issues including what medical tests women should have and how to ask for a family-friendly flex time schedule at work. On Wednesday, Ann Curry, the newly minted co-host of Today’s fourth hour, reported on studies that showed friendships have a direct result on women’s health. MSNBC.com ran photos sent in by viewers of themselves with their best friends.

Williams, acknowledging the lack of coincidence, says,

“Call it synergy, call it what you will, but it just made sense.”

Well, sure, if you’re a corporate behemoth trying to attract the wider female TV-viewing audience. But if you’re, say, a TV viewer interested in getting 19 minutes’ worth of information about the wider world on a program called NBC Nightly News, it means that you just might say to yourself: “What the hell is this?” and switch over to Charlie Gibson over on ABC.

Here he comes to save the day. (Single-handedly!) Mighty Anderson is on the way:

No two ways about it, the Fourth Estate is on life-support — and the public is eager to pull the plug. Once regarded as the noblest of professions, journalism has toppled from the heights of David Halberstam to the muck of Judith Miller.

Still, there’s one decidedly silver lining in this clouded sky — Anderson Cooper, the prematurely gray, ultra-soigné Anderson Cooper, whose award-winning coverage of everything from Bosnia to Katrina has been heralded as creating a new genre of journalist: the “emo reporter.” Capable not only of dealing with disasters both natural (New Orleans) and man-made (Somalia), but doing so with something resembling identifiable human empathy, this feisty yet elegant man-about-the-globe has quickly become the sine qua non of reportorial style. And what complements a celebrated style better than a celebrity scent?

Hey, wait. AC wouldn’t really do that, would he?

Initially Cooper turned him down,

Whew. That’s better. It must be all that good breeding I mentioned a while back. Hold on, though. “Initially” he turned it down? Then what happened?

…  but Mom (that’s Gloria Vanderbilt to you) thinks it’s a swell idea. And being the Marie Curie of celebrity product placement, she certainly knows what she’s talking about. So Cooper is reportedly going to give it some thought.

And why the hell not? It’s not as if anyone respects TV “news” personalities anymore anyway.

If you were feeling guilty about following the juicy story of the Los Angeles mayor’s “journalist” girlfriend who reported that the mayor was having an affair but failed to mention that she was his paramour, you can stop feeling guilty. Now.

In a post titled “More Hot Mayoral Sex,” Mickey Kaus explains why political gossip is good for America (emphases in the original):

The lid is off: L.A.’s mayor faces some N.Y. tabloid-style questioning at a news conference. The L.A. Times reporter who didn’t get the story doesn’t know quite what to make of this new state of affairs–I detect a mild sneering tone! Luke Ford sees a “beautiful synchronicity.” … I think Angelenos may be actually getting interested in local politics for once, which will give us better government in the long run. Special interests (e.g., unions, developers) have less power when people are actually paying attention. [What will happen if all the pols in power are no longer womanizers, etc.?--ed Not a serious possibility.] …

The powerful have less power when people are paying attention. And people pay attention when their interest is piqued. One of the things that piques people’s interest is gossipy, tabloid-style “journalism.” Even that is better than their paying no attention at all … which is the alternative.

Long live the people’s interest, and may we find many infotaining ways to pique it!

Today, the WSJ reports more or less everything I posted about Gaza yesterday (which I painstakingly stitched together after five weeks of following this story).

 Uncertain Fate
Of Gaza Reporter
Deepens Concerns

 Fanatical Islamists of the type sowing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to be operating with increasing impunity in the Gaza Strip, heightening concern about the rising danger posed by al Qaeda-inspired groups or similar violent fringe groups in the Palestinian territories.

An unconfirmed statement on Sunday by a group saying it had killed abducted BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has added to these fears. Even if that claim turns out to be false, the kidnapping marks a low point for the already troubled Gaza Strip. Palestinian human-rights groups are documenting an increasing number of firebombings and other attacks against targets such as Internet cafes, libraries and cultural centers.

Concerns about such violence come amid an overall state of lawlessness that has prompted even the United Nations to keep nearly all of its foreign staffers out of Gaza. The convoy of a lead official for the world body was shot at last month, despite the use of clearly marked U.N. vehicles. Foreign charitable organizations working in Gaza are similarly concerned.

So I’ve been saying for quite a while now.

I’m not bragging—I’m noting the lag between the time an energetic amateur like me notices a straw in the wind (in this case the Johnston kidnapping, which I’ve been writing about for five weeks) and the time it takes for the MSM to use its megaphone to luanch the story into the news cycle.

Truth be told, despite its huge impact on journalists and on journalism—and despite its ramifications for the rest of us, who depend on journalists to report those things that we cannot see or hear for ourselves—this story may never make it into the news cycle. The WSJ doesn’t have much of a megaphone.

Much will depend on what happens to Johnston (and the kidnappers are hoping to hook us with that ongoing soap opera, to grab our attention with it, as kidnappers are wont to do [[see this June 2006 post, "kidnapping makes for good television," for a link to a study about how kidnapping is an excellent headline-grabbing narrative for terrorists who are looking to make their mark, or their point, in a shrug-it-off world.]] ).

But let’s not forget that Johnston’s kidnappers are competing with what’s  being called the ”deadliest shooting rampage in American history“. Those kidnappers don’t stand a chance. Because we’re now going to feast on this orgy for weeks and weeks and weeks.

As the networks try to reinvent themselves, Headline News seems to be doing pretty well.

Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Ken Jautz of CNN:

Q: You’ve made a lot of changes in the two years you’ve run Headline News. What’s worked well?

A: We launched a prime-time lineup of point-of-view shows —- that is, shows that were focused on their hosts and their opinions. We likened this to the op-ed page of a newspaper. We emphasized that these shows were alternatives to the programs that were being offered on prime time on CNN. It was the first time we ever programmed our two main domestic channels in a complementary manner. It was, to be honest, a very big risk for us, [but] it was hugely successful. One of those shows, Nancy Grace, has tripled her audience. Glenn Beck has almost doubled. Those are numbers you don’t see very often in cable news. …

Q: Nancy [Grace] and Glenn [Beck] make you a target of critics. How do you balance the need for ratings with the need to cover news?

A: It’s most important to be honest and straightforward with your viewership, which is to identify exactly what you are doing. That is why we emphasize in both programming and marketing that these are point-of-view shows. They’re not journalists. It is good to bring different types of voices. …

Q: Headline News already feels different than CNN. Will that differentiation become more pronounced over time?

A: We will continue to emphasize that, and look for ways to underscore that Headline News is an alternative. That’s in prime time. It’s news by day, views by night.

And for those of you who like numbers:

The two youngest shows, by audience age, across both networks [CNN and Headline News], are Glenn Beck and ‘Showbiz Tonight.’ Glenn Beck’s audience is particularly affluent.

Now, that is weird.

(via TVNewser)