→2013→02→16→Comic Strip of the Day→CSotD: The voice of one crying in the vast wasteland
Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: The voice of one crying in the vast wasteland

Published: February 16, 2013 1 minute 6 comments

Cand130216
Indeed.

The ideal news story today would be if Kate Upton took an unscheduled drink of water while stranded on a cruise ship that was buzzed by a meteorite. And, if none of that happened, we could fall back on coverage of Honey Boo Boo.

I gave up on NBC Nightly News when they started doing features on viral videos. I'd add "I'm not making this up," but, if you haven't seen it, well, it's right there: Go take a look.

Brian Williams comes on at the opening and teases the stories and it's as if he were anchoring "News For People Who Need Help Keeping Up With What's All Over Facebook."

Worst of all, while the simplicity of today's Candorville is what makes it work, if there were a fifth panel, it would feature Clyde reminding Lemont that he's the only person in the entire world who cares about this stuff, and he wouldn't say it in a flattering way.

There are others beating their heads against that wall. In his latest, Matt Bors takes a swipe at the blow-dry boneheads of CNN:

Matt

Matt was even kind enough to provide a link on his site to Gawker's video snippet of that incredibly asinine interview so I didn't have to go look this up. Yes, the guy compared it to Katrina. No, the passenger wouldn't play along.

Three years ago, CNN cut their science and tech staff, saying “We want to integrate environmental, science and technology reporting
into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone
unit.” 

They did a fine job of that. This past week, one of their anchors asked Bill Nye if the approaching asteroid were a result of global warming.

Bad news coverage is not a conspiracy.

Well, okay, Fox is.

But most of this stupid stuff just happens.

Granted, when the various chatterers on those three-headed TV daytime news shows or radio morning drive chat-fests keep saying incredibly ignorant things — like using a blizzard to disprove "global warming" — you would think that someone in authority would at least tell them not to say something so transparently stupid again, even if they were allowed to stay on the air.

But the real "conspiracy" in the mainstream media is the one to save money and gain ratings. If someone is popular, it doesn't matter what sort of nonsense comes out of their mouth.

Reporting the news is not the goal. Making money is the goal. Don't confuse the two: It's just another TV show. "CSI: Miami" isn't supposed to be "Death of a Salesman," either. It's just supposed to be popular.

That's how it works.

Back when I used to do Career Day presentations, I would advise budding reporters to (1) major in something they cared about, (2) work on the school paper and finally (3) pick up a masters in journalism in order to satisfy sheepskin-obsessed employers.

The important thing, I said, was to learn to think critically and to become knowledgeable about something so you could report on it responsibly and authoritatively.

Good advice for a style of journalism that no longer exists. Even intelligent, thoughtful reporters aren't given time to file intelligent, thoughtful stories, because they also have to blog, cut videos and do at least five more stories by deadline, and edit their own copy.

Meanwhile, there's been a strange social reversal over in local broadcasting.

Forty years ago, the anchor and most of the reporters knew something, though they tended to drone a bit while reporting it, while the weather was either presented by an old burned-out guy who spent the rest of the day coordinating toothpaste ads from the firm that brokered national spots for local stations, or else a chipper, busty little "Weather Gal."

Either way, the skill set for doing the weather was to be able to stick pictures of the sun and some clouds on a feltboard and then point to them while reciting the wire service forecast.

Then two things happened: Stations switched to what was called the "Happy Talk" format (which is simply normal now and so has no name), and within a few years of that, they also started getting computers with radar and with which actual local up-to-the-minute predictions could be made.

The result of these moves is that, today, nearly all the people doing the news are cheerful, attractive chatty people who, in the old days, would have been performing "I Do, I Do" at the local dinner theater, while the weather person is now a science and/or math major — still telegenic, but better educated than any of the other happy telegenic people on the happy telegenic news set.

And not prone to wondering if asteroid fly-bys are a cosmic response to global warming.

Here's the instructional video for broadcast majors:

 

But here's something interesting: In 1955, five years after that musical opened on Broadway and seven years before Betty Friedan came out with "The Feminine Mystique," Juliet Jones delivered her own view on domestic bliss (which ran today at DailyInk):

Jj112355

Wow. No wonder she was perennially single. 

Dammit, woman, it's called "The Heart of Juliet Jones," not "The Mind of Juliet Jones." Nobody wants to read about the mind of Juliet Jones!

Stop being a snob. Give it up. Join the crowd, dancing Gangnam style on a cruise ship with Honey Boo Boo. And zombies.

Previous Post
CSotD: Beyond belief
Next Post
Calvin & Hobbes placed Into real photos

Comments 6

  1. “Good advice for a style of journalism that no longer exists.” That is terribly sad. This country needs a strong fourth estate. It has died.

  2. Yeah, one of the qualities that really made me stand out (freakishly?) in my couple years on a newspaper was my physics degree, and that still wasn’t enough to prevent me screwing up some stories in the tech/engineering/environmental realm. I completely agree that the state of journalism is no consipiracy, just self-selection. The English majors in my newsroom (some of the generally brightest people I’ve ever worked with, and that includes chemists) just weren’t equipped to handle everything; I could imagine one of them asking the asteroid/global warming question. Even less equipped are the “public speaking” or “broadcasting” majors who end up on TV. Journalists once brought invaluable real-world experience to the job–most of Cronkite and Murrow’s generation had been in war–which made their reporting a bit more thoughtful and robust than that of today’s J-school hot-house flowers. Your advice to journalists is similar to my advice to cartoonists: study something that interests you besides journalism or cartooning, then bring that to your craft. It’ll make you different and better.

  3. I had not been aware of the asteroid/global warming interview before reading about it here. It will take me the rest of the day to get over it. Or the week. Or forever.

  4. Well, this was beginning at The Gazette when I left to go into teaching. In 1968.
    Our local weather guys all have Doppler radar, but some still carry on about how many radars they have (“the power of 6”) Which is like saying, if you have 3 cars in your family, that you have 637 horsepower. Well, yeh. But you can’t count it all together at once.

  5. I was fired as marketing director for a local Colorado station as part of a move to free up money so they could bring in a team of trained seals to read the news. They were all gone within two years, and not only were they all gone but one of them had married one of the real local talents, so she was gone, too. Good investment, eh?
    Trivia note: One of the trained seals was Charles Claverie, aka Charles Rocket, who did for Jean Doumainian’s legendary stint at Saturday Night Live what he did for our news coverage.
    He never dropped an F-bomb on the air there, but he did say something stupid that resulted in the loss of several weeks of ratings. It’s a long story. Not an interesting one.

  6. Well she did use the word “meteoric”, which is the both the adj. for weather stuff and the adj. for meteor stuff. Normally those are two different meanings… unless you’re talking space weather (as on spaceweather.com, which has a section on asteroid encounters). Although she used it neither meaning (a metaphorical derived from the meteor meaning). But that’s not surprising, as far as I can tell, the news format today requires the anchors to do that sort of word play. Ie, you can’t have a simian story without it being “monkey business”, even if it’s about apes (not monkeys) and the phrase “monkey business” doesn’t really apply in any way. Making comments about “where’s the global warming” after a blizzard is also like that… pretty much an automatic cliche they have to do now. It will be easy to replace them with robots when the time comes.
    But, yeah, journalism has gotten a bit silly… leading questions are one of my peeves, where the interviewer does almost all of the talking, filling in the answer they want as part of the question. Which is fine when you’re talking to someone who’s inexperienced and has frozen up on camera, but otherwise you should be asking short questions and let the interviewee talk.
    Reporting on viral videos is a sign that they don’t know how to compete with the new media. It pretty much dooms you, because you sacrifice some of what you had to try to compete where you’re at a huge disadvantage (people aren’t going to tune to the news to watch youtube, because it isn’t as interactive as going to youtube)… you shouldn’t be trying to compete directly, you should instead focus on turning your differences into strengths.

Comments are closed.

Search

Subscribe to our newsletter

Get a daily recap of the news posted each day.
^ Top