The News is Nuts

"The wild roller coaster sells the amusement park tickets, not the merry-go-round."
- Chris Newlin, Eclectic Productions, Houston

There is no doubt the news is nuts. And the evidence is in every story and broadcast we hear, see, or read. Without conflict or drama, the news is uninteresting and when there is no conflict or drama, it must be manufactured.

"Hurricane Dean is approaching Central Mexico but that doesn't mean those of us in Houston are yet out of the Cone of Danger!!!! We are watching a high pressure system over Texas and if it weakens this storm could turn north right up the Gulf Coast and devastate every city in its path. Hell, it might even back up, go out in the gulf, power up to a category 5, and then run back on shore throwing giant waves, horrendous winds, and millions of illegal immigrants at us!!! Be prepared."

Sure, that's hyperbole, but it's also based in fact and protocol. TV weather people sound distraught when the storm misses their towns. Even political reporters would turn maudlin when disagreement turned to compromise. Who cares about resolution? Congress has to fight the president and he has to be contemptuous of Congress or there are no viewers and if there are no viewers there is no advertising and if there is no advertising there is no money and if there is no money there is no Wolf Blitzer. Hey, wait a minute, is that a bad thing?

Recent subpoenas issued by the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the president's warrantless domestic wiretapping program caused Blitzer to say over and over and over that the Democrats were taking on the White House. He just would not have it any other way, (as first pointed out by Media Matters) regardless of what his own correspondents were telling him. Wolf had his storyline and he was sticking to it. Two of the correspondents he had just interviewed, and political analyst Paul Begala, had all pointed out to Wolf that the three most senior Republicans on the committee had sided with the Democrats in issuing the subpoenas. Cooperation by the two parties on this controversy was not a development that interested Mr. Blitzer, however, so he ignored information from his own experts and kept repeating the notion that "it's the latest in a series of showdowns between congressional Democrats and the White House."

On camera, Dana Bash tried to subtly correct the anchorbeard by explaining the overwhelming vote and its political implications. "That means that many, if not most, of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee actually thought that this was a good idea because this warrantless surveillance program has certainly been controversial in both parties, Wolf."

Elaine Quijano, who was also on one of the big screens in the situation room and was covering the subpoena story, reminded Blitzer of what he had just been told, apparently hoping the two correspondents could get him correctly on the record. "But as we heard Dana just point out," Quijano explained, "This was a bipartisan vote, Wolf, so Republicans are also on board with this. Wolf?"

The situation in the situation room was getting increasingly lame. Ignoring both of his correspondents, the newsman brought in Begala and asked him a question that made it sound like Blitzer had heard nothing that had just been said.

"Is there a possibility," he wanted to know, "that the Democrats might overreach in issuing all of these subpoenas, Paul, to this Republican administration? Sort of the way that Republicans overreached during the Clinton administration when you were a key figure in the White House? You understand the question?"

Begala explained to the tunnel-visioned Blitzer that the vote had been 13-3, which indicated that the majority of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were behind the idea. Wolf, though he had now been told three times, must have been looking at those paltry ratings numbers for the situation room because when the next hour of his show was broadcast at 7 p.m. that evening, he hadn't relented from his narrative. Wolf needed what the fiction writers refer to as "dramatic tension" and he wasn't about to surrender it, regardless of whether his own reportorial staff was telling him he had it all wrong.

"Tonight," Wolf said, as the soundtrack thumped beneath the shadows cast by his beard and furrowed brow, "a potential constitutional confrontation between congressional Democrats and the White House in the making, happening now."

Nah, not really. It wasn't happening now or earlier in the day or ever, actually. It was only happening in Wolfworld, where the armies of Armageddon have assembled, goodness and light have collided with the great dark, and only Wolf can sort it out. So stay tuned; it's all coming up next on the situation room.

I am not sure if life imitates art or art imitates life or they just bang their heads together regularly to no purpose. But Wolf's intransigence reminds me a scene in The Shipping News, the fine Annie Proulx novel turned into a movie. One of the central characters, Quoyle, has just landed a job at a small town paper and is getting a bit of advice from the publisher/editor on how to write a good piece.

Billy: It's finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it, that's what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look, what do you see? [Points at dark clouds at the horizon]

Billy: Tell me the headline.

Quoyle: Horizon Fills With Dark Clouds?

Billy: Imminent Storm Threatens Village.

Quoyle: But what if no storm comes?

Billy: Village Spared From Deadly Storm.

This happened to me in Omaha about 25 years ago when I was a young TV news correspondent. There was a forecast for a blizzard to dump a foot of snow on the city but "tragedy was narrowly averted" as the storm went north about 30 miles. Unfortunately, we had dispatched several crews to sound the alarm of impending chaos and to save ourselves from looking stupid we had to do a follow-up story the next day to explain. An editor had heard the storm might have done damage to a little college town named Blair, which was about a half hour north. I was ordered to fly up in the news chopper and survey the potential devastation. The mayor met me at the airstrip for an interview.

"You have any problems yesterday, Mr. Mayor?"

"Aw, no. We got the folks out of the college and everybody home early. It wasn't bad at all."

"Were you able to keep the roads clear?"

"Sure, not that much snow, really. You can see."

I sure could. From the helicopter, brown cornstalks dominated the landscape and there were a few white spots of old drifts from a previous snowfall. Stupidly, I went on the air and reported, "It also snowed in Blair yesterday. They too plowed their streets. But they also avoided problems as the snowfall was just as minimal as it was in Omaha. As you can see from our Action News Chopper, there was hardly any snow on the ground in Blair this morning."

I kept my job. Barely.

In the nascent days of TV, Ernie Kovacs was famously quoted as saying, "Television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well-done." But it's not even a medium any more, especially television news.

It could be, though, if anyone had the courage to give it a try.

Comments

[skyblu]

Lou Dobbs Biography
Lou Dobbs is the anchor and managing editor of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight and a founding member of the network in 1980, as well as CNN's financial news division. Additionally, Dobbs anchors a nationally-syndicated financial news radio report. He writes a monthly column for Money magazine, a weekly syndicated column for the Sunday issue of the New York Daily News, is a contributing editor for U.S. News and World Report and also manages and edits his own financial newsletter, the Lou Dobbs Money Letter.


Dobbs has won nearly every major award for television journalism. He received the George Foster Peabody Award for his coverage of the 1987 stock market crash. In 1990, he was given the Luminary Award by the Business Journalism Review for his "visionary work, which changed the landscape of business journalism in the 1980s." In 1999, he received the Horatio Alger Association Award for Distinguished Americans and Dobbs was named "Father of the Year" by the National Father's Day Committee in 1993.

He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in economics. Dobbs serves on the boards of the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation, the Horatio Alger Association, the National Space Foundation and SPACE Holdings, Inc., in which he owns a minority stake, as he does in Integrity Bank. He is also a member of the Planetary Society, the Overseas Press Club, the American Economic Association and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

[birddog]

Wolf is oblivious to what is going on and is going to try make news his way rather than report. I wish someone could get it through his head that low ratings for congress also include republicans.

[Kirby]

The news is as skewed up and screwed up as the world view of the owners and editors would have it to be. It is that world view which slants everything in terms of their goals. So the news can only reflect the goals of those elders.

[SpaceCadet]

Are you sure Blitzer was trying to be dramatic? Maybe he really did have difficulty understanding that some of the tension that the founders intended does exist between the branches of government, as opposed to the partisan bickering that Blizter is fixated on and that the founders abhorred. It's always seemed to me that he's dumb as a fence post. To make it in TV "journalism" these days, I guess the only thing you need is a pulse. And a beard.

[robcmor]

Let me draw a picture:

Time Warner, Inc. -----> CNN
General Electric -----> NBC
Viacom -----> CBS
Disney -----> ABC
Newscorp -----> Fox

The network and cable news depend on advertisers to make a profit because all of the outlets are owned by a major media conglomerate. The only way to earn ratings is to inflate a headline to gargantuan proportions. The so-called "news" is blurred similarly across all the outlets. They all sound the same. They all tilt toward the right. Wolfie, Anderson, ShepBoy, Couric, etc., are all entertainers; they are not journalists. If they were journalists, they would never be earning the sinful salaries they do.

If you want real news, go find it on your own and stop watching these over-inflated ego maniacs on TV.

[nomadic]

Jim Moore, thank you. There are times when I really feel alone in my view of news reporting. I now know that I was never alone, and believe me, these days that is an almost overwhelming relief.

Rick

[Archie1955]

Your description of wolf Blitzer on camera is exactly why I don't watch TV news anymore. I want news people or commentators to report the truth or reality of any situation not to spout their own slanted version of what's happening. Where are the Walter Cronkites of today when we need them?

[justfacefacts]

Note to brain: Seek out, then sort out facts. Ignore emotional ranting from self proclaimed experts and invisible bloggers. Filter out those who demonize others with divisive nonsense. Respect differences and debate with majority of synapses firing. Go forth.

[richw23]

Speaking of Wolf, did anyone catch him the afternoon some virus hit CNN. First, expert-in-all-things, Ali, perpetual explainer of 'facts' he just got, inadvertently shows the incompetence of CNN's security by displaying what's happening on his computer. Then they describe the meltdown that's happening on the internet, apparently because they can name two companies that have been hit by it.

Then Wolf gets some actual computer expert on the phone and tries to get him to advise everyone to unplug from the internet, but the guy won't do it. Wolf re-phrases the question by reminding the guy that everyone has important data that might be lost - "just to be safe, shouldn't they disconnect". The guy still wouldn't agree, which was clearly frustrating to Wolf.

I don't remember which virus it was, but it ended up doing not that much damage as I recall. I think CNN might have been the worst hit. I only tuned in by accident and it was totally worth it.

Why is Wolf still on anyway. Is it because he was in Baghdad for the first airstrike in the first gulf war? I remember him being under a table most of the time.

[peterg76]

In the days before CNN was just a tabloid, this would have been newsworthy.

I don't suppose it would do any good to point out to Blitzer that a constitutional crisis is caused by the people violating the constitution, not the ones following it.

[Janus]

And the beat goes on with a silent, compliant press having career futures to consider ahead of the traditions of journalism in its awareness of the de-ja vu political and economic events of modern America under current Reichwing Republican objectives:

From the Information Clearing House Newsletter
08/21/07

"The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses." : Ed Crane
>Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power: Benito Mussolini
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group," : Franklin D. Roosevelt

*****************************************

[mdamico]

I think you're being kind by calling the news 'nuts'...
It's the braindead unthinking lemmings like Wolf Blitzer and most of the mainstream media that are USELESS... not 'nuts'. They are anything but 'journalists' anymore... they are just media whores.

[BritPatJax]

Two points in response to Blogs. USA will not even run what BBC has to say about Iraq let alone AL Jazeera. Haditha reported here, talk of 'our heroes' and collected $200,000 to support them. BBC shows the young girl who pretended to be dead when the massacre happened. Another point about road reports, I was my city's Road Safety Committee Chair in the UK and it irks me when in Jax they ALWAYS say that there has been an accident and there are delays due to 'rubbernecking' when in fact they should be saying, "there are delays due to the fact that people are taking extra care through the situation and perhaps having an heightened awareness of their mortality for a short time"?

[BritPatJax]

News is a funny thing. Over in UK I was obsessed by the OJ case and watched it constantly. I was disappointed with America ultimately. I had also been disappointed over JFK. I watched News constantly when Diana died. I was one of the few still up as my nation slept and I was up all night watching. I spent a night watching news in LA when the big earthquake was happening so near. I had never seen TV crews actually being told to get the hell out of there as the tried to take cameras into the collapsed freeways. I was in contact with my UK local news and put out 'live'. I saw things that would not be shown in UK. A leg and sneakers protruding from a VW that had bricks piled on it? The vehicle registration clearly visible? I watched avidly 9/11 in a London pub as I took my last look before emigrating. I miss London! I could not stop watching that event and on arriving back at home that night watched from a mattress in the lounge for days on end what was happening in the nation I was already programmed to retire in? News is invaluable when you need it but how do 24 hour stations manufacture news? I could not help hearing in Neal Boorzt voice how pumped up he was over having VT massacre happen. He was so keen to promote gun law and how those sweet students should have been armed. Different issue I know. News online is now always available and honest. Go to at least three sites to compare.

[azphil]

The classic example of the air of disappointment that descends on a news show when the bad stuff doesn't happen is when the aircraft with one wheel that won't come down lands safely. They have been watching this plane circle the airport for two hours, had every talking head speculating on what could/might/may happen and then the pilot does his job and lands safely. Bummer. You can see the Wolf/Larry person thinking "They didn't crash, the bastards!".

I agree with the other bloggers that CNN International is far more balanced and covers (gasp) foreign news. They even have a US presenter who seems to have avoided hype school. My wife gets really annoyed when they are pre-empted by a breaking news story (dramatic of course) here in the US. You know the kind were a school bus is seen trying to negotiate a potentially/possibly/maybe dangerous speed bump.

[Bozwellian]

One rather NICE new tech...the ipod castings and online repolays of various on air shows...easier to give up the cable/sat's and still catch some of the REAL favorites but SELECTIVELY. WHO REALLY needs 500 channels of incessant non watchable drivel...LOL, we have the supposed TOP TIER package and 99.7% of it is NOT watched be it movies or other and most are but repeated repeats as there just is NOT enough NEW (and for that blame outrageous salaries for such as supposed series that pay their cast memeber outrageous salaries per episode and then due to costs cut the number they put together and just repeat and repeat and inbetween premempt for some gawd-awful meaningless award show of one sort or another. The NEW seasons start in late September these days...the repeats begin in October and the seasons end in April, with repeats til season finales in early May and then repeated all summer/etc...and then they wonder WHY they have no audience or unable to build an audience/etc. Lots of books available, and libraies let you borrow them for FREE !!!! very cost effective !!!!

[mr. d.]

Yeah, the weather "report" ...and the fire swept through the town destroying many homes including several worth more than a million dollars. Oh yes, the ones worth more than 1m$ certainly deserve special mention don't they.

[Lisette]

.
All the people on TV who merely "read" the news have become performers.

They are not reporters in the true snse of the word. They nver have been and never will be.

I think they will bring back newspapers!!!!
Funny, but true. :)

[murphy80]

Blitzer was the main reason i cancelled cable.

[Justanothercoverup]

There's another reason we don't have "real" news, and it's due to corporatism; If the MSM would report the actual "news", i.e., the crimes that have been perpetrated against the American people and the world by the Bush administration, it wouldn't be 30 days until impeachment hearings were started in Congress! Most of the American people would be outraged if they really knew the actual harm that Bush/Cheney have caused to the economy, the environment, and the danger their foreign policy poses to America in general...

Their ratings would skyrocket, because when it comes to sensationalism - what could possibly be more "sensational" than the fabric of our Constitution and Bill of rights being ripped-apart and the very essence of what made America great being systematically dismantled?

"What if" the average American were alerted that democracy is being unraveled and systematically replaced by authoritarian rule, that the United States is turning into a "police state", and the contempt that Bush/Cheney have for Congress and the American people? THAT is real sensationalism - and if the MSM started reporting the facts instead of political spin, Americans would be glued to the nightly news - massive protests would materialize as "we the people" began to understand the fragile state that our democratic republic was in - and they would demand change!

Knowledge is power, and as long as the MSM hides the truth from America, there will be no uprising by the people, because as a majority, most Americans don't have a clue how thin the ice is we tread on - and how close we are to falling-into the icy waters of tyranny and fascism.

To me, the most fascinating factor is that if just one major network would break-away from the pack of propagandists that now provide our daily dose of Kool-aide and return to real journalism, they would absolutely dominate the news and ratings - but the stench of corporatism is so great that none will stand-up and fight to save our country, and that's a sad commentary on the state of our nation.

[weaverhv]

Everyone is missing the obvious. Wolf Blitzer is a partisan; a Republican "wolf" guarding the henhouse.

[InternationalObserver]

Since some have praised CNN International, I should point out that they do also broadcast Wolf's Situation Room. The other recommended network is BBC World (not to be confused with BBC America) which IS good, as is the English language version of Al Jazeera (fronted mainly by ex BBC and CNN staff).

But of course no American cable network is going to screen Al Jazeera because that would be unpatriotic, right? A pity, because they (and the BBC) do provide a more real version of what's going in the world than Fox, CNBC, et al.

[RevMetheus]

There's a mid-80s Don Henley song that always sums it up for me when I think about the media and news:

Bubbleheaded bleach-blonde comes on at 5/
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash
with a gleam in her eye/
Its interesting when people die
Give us Dirty Laundry.

Since the 80s, we've never gotten over the idea that facts, opinions, and entertainment should be so intertwined as to be indistinguishable. People talk about commentators and editorialists as "reporters." Opinion columns are used to back up hard news. We can be swayed into war by mere opinion with no facts.

There is a narrative, and we are not considered part of it.

[mamacat]

Loved your article, thank you.
When I was (much) younger, the news was only half an hour long, and if there was nothing to report, sometimes the newscasters would talk to each other and muse about life. What I mean to say is, if the news departments won't or can't report any news, why don't they just get off the air and put something else on?
Besides, when I want news, it is almost a waste of time these days to watch the American news channels. Who wants to watch another interview with President Liar in which the interviewer asks absolutely no tough questions?

[webmind]

Great stuff. Brilliant!