one inch frame

I do not regularly watch any corporate network news, though occasionally I’ll turn on Keith Olberman’s show. Still, an article over at Presentation Zen got me thinking.

I subscribe to Presentation Zen because I do rarely have to sit through presentations, and occasionally even give one or two myself (teaching duties notwithstanding). I think I know what makes a good presentation, and what makes a bad one, and PZ helps me fine-tune my own presentations and sensibilities.

The article on the horrible ‘interface’ of corporate news, though, “Cleaning Up Our Act”, shows stark examples of the over-hyped and under-content state of corporate news outlets. Any message that might be there gets either severely diluted or lost altogether in the craptacularly-filled screen. The ‘ticker’ is the one that gets my goat most of all. It’s no secret that listening to one thing while reading another causes a great loss in the “signal retention” of each. ESPN was probably the first one to popularize the whole news ticker thing on TV, but those are at-a-glance sports scores, for the most part, which, not only are they one-and-done kind of glances, is still just sports. If we are to be an informed populace, the innundation of different, glossed-over stories, is quite detrimental.

Which brings me to the topic of the stories themselves. What was the biggest story last week?

Consider this hypothetical situation. Just hours apart, two things happen:

• A confession in a murder case from 10 years ago. While the case made national news at the time, and remains a mystery, the person confessing looks more deranged than guilty, and holes are quickly shown in the story, looking more and more like not a whole lot of truth.
• A government program is ruled unconstitutional by a federal court. This program involved governmental agencies spying on its own citizens without going through agreed upon legal channels in place for 30 years. Should the ruling stand, the existence of the program clearly levels over 30 counts of felony charges directly at the President, obvious grounds for impeachment. The program is referenced by the government, seeking to protect itself and the program, in a recent high-profile bust, even though it is quickly determined that the law officers in the case used more traditional, legal, means.

The biggest story last week? No, not the Federal Courts striking down the Warrantless Wiretapping program, but the confession in the JonBenet Ramsey case. According to Think Progress, the three major broadcast networks spent from twice to seventeen times as much of their nightly news broadcast on the Ramsey case as they did on possible grounds for impeachment:

What does that tell you? (source)

The case for impeachment is growing (it’s actually quite strong even without the illegality of the warrantless wiretapping program), or that the support for impeachment is approaching a majority of Americans (42% in March). According to this report, there are few news outlets even talking about the gathering storm.

I realize I’m mostly preaching to the choir at this point, but the sad lesson evident here is that the major broadcast networks (I’d love to see similar data on the cable networks) couldn’t give a hoot about actual news. Corporations exist to make money, and corporate TV networks are no exception. But, someone, somewhere, decided that news could also exist to make money, so news divisions within corporations now have to worry about ratings and viewership and not throw anything (like, say, high crimes against our country from its leaders) at viewers that may cause letter-writing campaigns and advertiser boycotts from certain segments of the population.

The corporatization of major news outlets also leads to the dumbing down and glossing over of news stories. Eager to hold on to eyes and ears, the networks have to feed us sugar-coated stories, or water down the actual news stories to the point where they’re totally pointless, even perhaps relegating them to a 10-words-or-less summary on the ticker, while talking heads tell us about the next thing we should be frightened of. There’s absolutely no way to get any substance out of these people, because substance is not only hard, it’s probably boring to the beer-and-football crowd. American citizenship should be one of the most active, difficult, and time-consuming tasks we concern ourselves with. But survey after survey shows Americans to be either oblivious to world events or just plain stupid. There are lots of reasons for that, but that’s (mostly) another show.

So, where should we get our news, then? Who provides the fair and balanced (oh, I humbly apologize for that) view of the actual goings-on around us? Sites like nowpublic (a Drupal site, btw), or newsvine allow citizens to write the news, and not just commentary on packaged news releases, but actual journalism (to the best the Internet allows, anyway) on topics. The Wikipedia sees a flurry of activity around major topics when news stories break, and there’s also Wikinews. These aren’t answers, necessarly, but just more questions. Can we, as global citizens, be trusted to give the news to ourselves, in a non-partisan way? One of the things that gives Newsvine a prominent place in my RSS aggregator is that all sides to stories are often given. And, there are the fluff pieces on these outlets, to be sure, but, if I want “real” news, it’s there. I couldn’t get an intelligent, reasoned, or substantive discussion of news topics from the major networks, even if I wanted to. Combine that with the popularity of network news, that most people use them as their only source for news, and we have the incredible mess that is the USA and the mess it has made of the world. The real question is, though, is it too late?