Too Much News, Too Little Journalism

For many years now, I've been critical of the oversaturation of "news" flooding the airwaves, both on cable and on broadcast television.  Generations back, news was seen as a loss leader by the major networks, a public service that drew eyeballs for a half hour per day in the early evening and hopefully keeping those eyeballs around for more profitable entertainment series in the hours that followed.  But at some point over the ensuing years, that script flipped and media enterprises found a way to monetize news.  And given how challenging the media landscape is these days with competition from the internet and streaming services, news has increasingly become the lowest-denominator "filler" that broadcasters turn to when looking to occupy hours of air time.  It would be one thing if all of these hours of ostensible "news" represented actual journalistic enterprise, but the content keeps managing to get lazier even as it cannibalizes more hours of the day.

I was intrigued last year when cable newsman Chris Wallace mused that his father's series "60 Minutes", one of the long-standing bright spots of journalistic integrity on the television airwaves, was actually more responsible than any other endeavor in altering the economics of television news in the wrong direction.  "60 Minutes" was so popular in its day that it turned a profit, which television news had not done before, and so began the road to perdition we've been on since 1968.  As a consequence, John Stossel's consumer alert journalism and exposes on pro-wrestling from "20/20" that seemed so light and fluffy in the mid-80s seem like Edward R. Murrow by comparison to what qualifies as "news" today.

All one has to do is to look to what "20/20" has become in the 35 years since then, along with CBS's "48 Hours" which did some fascinating journalistic endeavors in its earliest incarnation in the 80s, to recognize how badly standards have fallen.  Nowadays, both shows have been retooled as "murder shows", relaying the breakdown of sensationalized criminal trials.  NBC"s "Dateline" was always trash but it too has retooled into reality crime nonsense and makes no effort to hide its gimmickry with the slogan "Don't Watch Alone" tagged onto every "Dateline" advertisement.  What used to be relegated to "Unsolved Mysteries" or "Inside Edition" is now marketed under the rubric of a "newsmagazine".

While the evening network news broadcasts maintain a modicum more professional integrity than the primetime newsmagazines, it's only a matter of degree of clunkiness.  On any given evening, particularly in the winter, you can count on at least five minutes of the evening news broadcast to be dedicated to the weather.  It's often the lead story!  Imagine back in the days of Walter Cronkite tuning in the evening news and seeing that a snowstorm in Minnesota in January was the lead story.  These days it's the rule more often than the exception that cold weather in Minnesota in the winter is headline news.

During times of national or especially international upheaval, network war correspondents often do fine work of passing along stories and imagery overseas that capture the gravity of the moment, but these actual journalistic efforts are almost always buried more than 10 minutes deep into the broadcast, long after the five-minute national weather reports run their course.  To some degree, this is supply and demand, but that's kind of the point.  It's the inevitable byproduct of the monetization of news.  The fact that what sells epitomizes the laziest journalistic tendencies really imperils the industry's mission statement.

As a former journalist myself, I can relate.  Talking about the weather is more fun and a whole lot easier than going out in the field to do actual investigative reporting.  Similarly, the mass expansion of round table-style gabfests, particularly on cable news, is the ultimate easy way to make a buck and call yourself a reporter while doing so.  But in the time being, a bunch of corrupt elected officials are looting city halls all over the country while fewer and fewer journalists are holding them to account because they can't stop talking about "the storm on the way".

Obviously, the financial situation for print media is dire, but it's not as clear that broadcast media is suffering from the same cutbacks.  Certainly if the amount of hours they allot to news coverage per day is in any way symmetrical to the news department's budget, they should be flush with cash, making their laziness all the more indefensible.  

Worse yet, in the zeal to draw eyeballs by whatever means necessary, the media is often complicit in selling a narrative that has no basis in reality.  Most journalists lean to the left politically, but even discounting blatant partisan message-setting, we're increasingly seeing unsavory efforts to shoehorn a situation to fit a storyline even though the facts very clearly don't back it up.  One of the clearest examples was in the summer of 2019 when the media whipped up a mass national panic about a surge in hospitalizations among teens allegedly brought about by vaping.  Anybody who did two minutes worth of research on these hospitalizations identified black market cannabis vaping products as the common denominator among the young people hospitalized, but the media twisted themselves into pretzels pretending that commercially available nicotine vape products were to blame.  Add in the combustible mix of political polarization on matters such as premature assigning of blame in police shootings or the infamous Nick Sandman rush to judgment of 2019-2020 and the media's manipulations can become downright dangerous.

Unfortunately, there's no indication that any of these bad trends will cease to continue any time soon.  Print journalism continues to swirl the drain with no relief in sight while the line is blurring between cable news and broadcast news, both in the click-baity, narrative-spinning nature of the content and the amount of airtime needed to occupy.  I remember a time when the broadcast networks signed off at midnight and the airwaves went static until morning.  Now, canned network news fills the airwaves all night long.  I also remember a time when the morning news shows like "Today" and "Good Morning America" were only two hours.  Now, they've added third hours.  And I also remember a time when the afternoons were occupied with soap operas.  But the news leviathan is even managing to devour the final throes of that era.

Last fall, the most recent indignity of broadcast TV's "news" expansion was taking away long-running daytime soap "Days of Our Lives" from the little old ladies still watching it.  Apparently "Days of Our Lives" is still being produced but it was shuttled from NBC's broadcast station, where it had been on the air for more than 50 years, to the network's pay-per-view sister station Peacock.  If your grandma wants to watch "Days of Our Lives" in 2023, she better pay her ransom to the streaming service leg-breakers holding the airwaves hostage.  As for what has occupied "Days of Our Lives" old time slot on NBC daytime....well that would be "NBC News Live".  Yet again another unnecessary hour of artificial "news". Bet you didn't see that one coming huh?