NEWS COVERAGE IN AMERICA REVISITED

(Only partly tongue-in-cheek)

R. William Holland

Board Chair, United Professionals

Author, Are There Any Good Jobs Left? (Praeger, 2006)

Seems as if a lot of people feel the way I do. That is, they have given up on news coverage in America—at least until the election is over. Tim Russert’s passing did not help, but what happened to me began long before his untimely death. This final leg of the road to my blackout of the news culminated with Rush Limbaugh’s coverage of Obama’s speech in Berlin. I found my self trapped in a car on the way to a client meeting, and the only station I could get covering the speech live was Rush’s daily diatribe against Liberals.

Instead of hearing about the inspiration thousands of Germans felt as they waved American flags, I heard Limbaugh talking over each and every paragraph in critique of the speech as it happened. The only context he provided was his point of view and what he wanted every listener to believe. Limbaugh took his self-serving rudeness to a new level, and the eventual critique was that the speech was a form of celebrity on the order of Paris Hilton and those socialist Europeans have no business interfering in our election.

The absurdity of that position is not my point. I am concerned that news coverage in America seems to have degenerated into little more than events of spin in which listeners routinely have to suffer a recap of what they just heard (often less than accurate), what it means, and what they should think about it. News has come a long way in America since I was a kid—and most of that way has been down the road to Hell.

I remember being quite upset when my dad commandeered the TV each night to listen to the five minutes that was the nightly news. By the time it expanded to fifteen minutes, I was old enough to be interested, but not enough to miss any of my favorite shows (I Love Lucy, Nat King Cole and others).

Okay, I’m showing my age, but that’s the price I’m willing to pay for truth, wisdom and virtue. Eventually the news went to a half hour—then an hour—and eventually all day. Now we can tune in any time to find out from the pundits what happened, what it means in the context of all that is holy, and what each of us should think about it.

With such ubiquity, I am reminded that President Eisenhower insisted that his daily summary of events in the world be limited to a single typewritten page. How did we go from five good minutes to twenty-four hours of babble with spin on it? (That’s “spin,” not “spit.”) A large part of the answer is found in the transformation of the news from a public service to a source of profit. As media outlets got better at tracking who watches and when they do it, news began to have substantial commercial value. Content and quality have been replaced by measures of audience share.

I know! I know! That’s the price we have to pay for progress. Cable and the Internet have given us more outlets than anyone ever thought would exist. Advertising revenue and profitability are more important, not less. And “spin doctors” attract viewers who are set in their ways and always able to get their point of view articulated regardless of how uninformed that point of view might be. In this world, the ability to label those with whom you disagree is more important than the content of their point of view.

This labeling — I call it name calling — has been showing up lately on Main Street, Wall Street and in our political bodies. And it shows up at a time when reasoned deliberation and discourse are more important than ever. Too bad we no longer have those five minutes of nightly news. We could use them.