What follows is my monthly column in the Albuquerque Tribune. It ran yesterday, Thursday, September 22, 2005.As always, I would appreciate your comments.
A.A.
News Splash
Let’s see how both sides have painted the media – and how that might be wrong
By Arthur Alpert
We were talking about news - how objectivity diverts us from truth and, last month, how the Right uses "liberal media bias" to divert attention from its agenda. To wind up, I decided to forego simple judgments and spell out, instead, how money, technology, law, history and other factors really do shape our news.
Terrible idea.
It’s too complex. Involves too many biases, by which I mean influences or directions. I’d need a book to untangle the Jackson Pollock action painting that is our system.
How about we just throw some colors at the canvas and see what sticks. Ready?
Splash: Green is the primary color in the news business. Green as in dollar bills. News companies exist to make money. As Martha might say, that’s a good thing. Reporters and editors like to eat. A defunct newspaper serves no one.
Splash: Journalism lives inside the news business and most news people operate quite independently there. (Attention, liberals – Henry Luce is still dead. Erase those mental pictures of Despotic J. Publisher censoring Truth.)
Yes, Brittany, Jen, Brad and Paris get more ink and videotape than, say, Karl Rove, but - as the movie trailers once proclaimed – they are "back by popular demand."
Splash: Corporations dominate broadcast news. Not the powerful networks of yesteryear, but their owners - titanic global enterprises that deal in defense contracts, refrigerators, finance, theme parks, movies, cable, music, Internet commerce, satellite TV and the kitchen sink.
Murrow, Huntley and Brinkley played second fiddle to sitcoms, but their bosses (broadcasters) basked in the prestige and saw the FCC placated. Today the numbers guys (not broadcasters) who steer GE, Disney, Viacom and Fox know Wall Street pays off for improved quarterly results. Period. Oh, and the FCC is a buddy.
Affect on TV news? Relegated to fifth fiddle. There are tighter budgets. Fewer foreign bureaus. Recycling of stories. Awareness in the ranks that "corporate" is disinclined to offend the White House. (Hard questions out of New Orleans? They shall pass.)
Splash: Novelists explore complexity, journalists simplify. TV (with less time than a paper has space) over-simplifies daily. Its reporters omit most of the story. Effect? Public servants get away with, I guess, four out of five lies.
Splash: Technology matters. Ragamuffins no longer bark, "Extree! Extree! Read all about it" because radio and TV stole the breaking news job. Newspapers found new roles. (The Tribune’s brilliant adaptation is one reason I’m proud to write for it.)
Splash: Technology biases content. Pictures may move us, but they show surfaces, not thoughts or feelings. Moving images convey sensory information, not the kind we get from black letters on white newsprint. TV news content doesn’t help us think.
Splash: Public Television has virtues, but since its prime news program won’t reach even the most innocuous conclusions - for fear of bugging a benefactor? – it’s boring. So is the idea-challenged "Washington Week in Review". Responsible journalism? Snore.
Splash: Bring back Happy Talk! Today’s "local TV news" is a Rio Grande - a constant flow of street crime and other dysfunction. It’s quite educational, teaching viewers to fortify the house, never leave and vote for law-and-order. Achtung!
The colorful strands multiply and intersect and, stepping back from the painting, I discern a pattern. We’ll explore it next month, but here’s a preview: I see a dirty word emerging: "class."
Alpert, a semi-retired newsman in Albuquerque, may be reached at
ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column appears in Insight and Opinion the fourth Thursday of the month.