Media & Our Awareness
“You Don’t Understand Our Audience” By John Hockenberry
I always had a great distaste for television. I felt that it was part of the problem with American society. Only a handful of programs such as Nova, Dateline, 60 Minutes, and CBS News Evening News with Dan Rather among others attempted to show Americans that the world didn’t end at the Atlantic and Pacific beach-front properties.After Dan Rather left the CBS Evening News, I was quickly turned off by Katie Couric. If it wasn’t the first broadcast it was easily within the first week. When I heard that she was slated to take over and that she had been associated with Good Morning America (Was she a host? Never knew, never really cared) I worried that the news was going to go straight into the toilet. There’d be less about politics, foreign relations, basically the kind of stuff that really matters, and more touchy-feely fluff content was going to be put on to console viewers upset with some of the reporting and events that led to Dan Rather’s oust.
It didn’t take me long to be disappointed and John Hockenberry nails the issue right on the head.
It is still a mystery to me why television news remains so dissatisfying, so superficial, and so irrelevant. Disappointed veterans like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather blame the moral failure of ratings-obsessed executives, but it's not that simple. I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.
Today, the best I can do is tune to the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams in podcast forma, watch the first ten minutes or so, scroll through the middle of the program and catch the end. It’s disappointing, because ten minutes barely scratches the surface of what’s going on in the world. This is the kind opportunity lost that Hockenberry is lamenting. I know that the major media outlets are feeding me the news equivalent of junk food and I’m just getting sick of it! I’m watching the podcast format so I don’t have to deal with the commercials (Speaking of which, commercials have been reduced to two items: FORD TRUCKS and VIAGRA) and I skip three quarters of the content. My return on investment is diminishing rapidly.
What absolutely knocked me on my proverbial can was this little gem that Hockenberry shares. The week of 9/11, Hockenberry wanted to do a piece to try and explain the conditions under which people might want to hijack airliners and fly them into crowded office buildings. Sadly, his idea got crushed by a “fluff” pitch. There was no time for hard facts, this was a time for viewers to find the “emotional center” of 9/11.
The story of firefighters trapped in the crumbling towers, Zucker said, was the emotional center of this whole event. Corvo enthusiastically agreed. "Maybe," said Zucker, "we ought to do a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras. Like the show Cops, only with firefighters." He told Corvo he could make room in the prime-time lineup for firefighters, but then smiled at me and said, in effect, that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine.
Skipping the perverted and cold calculating nature of that pitch, I’ll just focus on the attitude that nothing important happens around the world that affects us. This attitude leads to people thinking 9/11 happened because of this and this. Somehow, something got lost in translation. It’s a shame that Ron Paul has to burst everyone’s bubble that 9/11 wasn’t about “hating freedom” or something easy to comprehend, easy to digest, and easy to write off or ignore.
I don’t agree with Ron Paul’s views on other topics, but at least he and I are in agreement on the cause of 9/11.
I would recommend devoting some time to reading John Hockenberry’s piece. I’ve had enough of the diversions, emotional centers, and junk food news.