The News IS All Bad

Sorry I’ve gone missing again… Been having some upheavals in my personal life. Readers of my private journal have been gagging on THAT hairball for the past few days…

But even a small nervous breakdown can’t keep me totally away from the news, or what passes for news in 21st century America. I’ve come to suspect that this is a huge part of our problems as a nation: what passes for news. I recently finished reading Bad News, a book written by Tom Fenton, a CBS news foreign correspondent whose career spanned five decades—from the sixties through to the first years of the new millennium. He broke into the news business during what future generations might call the "Golden Age of Television News." Those days when serious, fatherly figures like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley sat behind the news desks, looked into the cameras and deadpanned the "who, what, when, where and how" of the world into our homes, where we were most likely to be found before, during or after our evening meal. In those days, television news was a public service required of every network, with the enlightened hope that this awesome new medium could be used as a tool to educate the American people about the increasing complexities of the world in which they lived.

Fenton’s book was mostly a whiney diatribe, proclaiming that the demise of his particular specialty—foreign news—has led to all things evil in this country, including 9/11. He insists that if foreign news bureaus hadn’t been depleted or closed down as cost-cutting measures after the end of the Cold War, and if editors back home had not developed the practice of purposely omitting unpleasant or upsetting foreign stories from the broadcast line-up in order to boost or maintain ratings, the American people would not have been so blind-sided by the events of September 11, 2001. At least, we would not have been shaking our heads and crying, "Why do they hate us so much?" We probably would have had at least some inkling about the smoldering anti-American sentiment abroad.

He does have a point. With the advent of cable television, with its all-news formats creating the 24-hour news cycle, the Big Three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—suddenly found themselves competing for viewers in an arena where, obviously, there were big bucks to be made (after all, CNN seemed to be rolling in dough…) The news departments were designated "profit centers," where they had once been public service. Their mission changed from serving the public to entertaining it; and that, in one fell swoop, spelled the end of any meaningful news reaching the eyes of the American people.

During the nineties, we tuned in, rapt, to day after mind-numbing day of the O.J. Simpson trial, wailed for months over Princess Diana’s fatal car accident, allowed the dissection and ultimate impeachment of President Clinton to dominate our media for six years…. While the Balkans were exploding, Africa was eating itself alive, Osama Bin Laden was cultivating Al Qaeda cells all over the world (and our own nation), North Korea was slithering up the nuclear ladder. While the world around us writhed in the throes of changes that would affect each and every one of us on a daily basis, we created and glued ourselves to soap opera after national soap opera. Real news can be ugly, it can be unpleasant, it can be challenging, it may make you think.

With a whole new field of players to chose from, Americans were increasingly choosing that which did not depress, outrage or challenge them. We chose entertainment over news. And now, that is what "news" is all about. To our huge detriment as a people who, arguably, possess the power to choose those who lead us into this shrinking, volatile, delicate world.

Call this installment number one of a short series on "Bad News" (with a nod to Tom Fenton for borrowing the title of his book…)