Cable news channels often promote trivia dressed as urgent news
Watching the 24-hour cable television news channels can be addictive. But just like any obsessive behavior, more of the same thing even if it is available 24 hours a day is not necessarily better. Another way of assessing the overabundance of news channels would be to consider the days when most homes could only receive 36 channels on a cable system.
How many of us can say that getting three times that number of channels has increased the value of information or entertainment by threefold? Someone referred to television as the vast wasteland. Now we have a wasteland with 500 channels.
The war in Iraq is certainly compelling television. At least, at the beginning of the conflict. Several days and several hundreds of TV broadcast hours later the cable news channels often struggle to find real news to report.
A particularly annoying habit of the cable news channels is their eagerness to broadcast the slightest rumor, report of a battle, bombing or movement of troops.
We have arrived at the day in the television cable news business when an unconfirmed rumor is enough reason for the TV producers to rush an urgent news flash onto the screen. No news channel wants to be the last one to report the latest news bulletin, even if it turns out that the information is inaccurate at best or false at worst.
They are not content just to report the news with video from the scene. It all has to be surrounded by dramatic music and flashy graphics. I think most people would prefer just to see the news, not a poor imitation of a Sylvester Stallone movie.
If you watch one of these channels for any length of time, you can definitely get the impression that what you are seeing is the latest news.
The only problem is that a great deal of the information you will be hearing is wrapped around speculation, rumor and “unconfirmed reports.”
As a result, the value of much of what you will hear and see is extremely limited. It might have a lot of flash, promotion, dramatic music and colorful, animated graphics, but it’s still just mostly a lot of junk or rehashed news.
Then there are those annoying little headlines, they call them “crawls,” which move unceasingly across the bottom of the TV screen. It doesn’t matter that the news being featured on these headlines is of little consequence or importance much of the time.
From time to time the news channels get a shot of adrenaline. That happens when a legitimate news event actually occurs. As an example of this, consider the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. Millions of viewers were locked on to the cable news channels for hours.
The same is true of the current war in Iraq. One big development, such as the demise or ouster of Saddam Hussein, will create another rush of viewers to the news channels, especially if any dramatic video showing Hussein leaving in a Republican Guard convoy happens to be available.
In the meantime, the channels will fill all of their broadcast time with retired military generals talking endlessly, in front of big maps, about what they would do if they were in charge, and showing video reruns of bombs falling on Baghdad.
The nature of this news beast is that it’s always hungry. It can never get enough.
It can never rest. It sometimes pushes the human news anchors to the limits of their ability to ask new questions. Trivia is elevated to undeserved importance.
As consumers and viewers, we can be fooled once or twice into believing that what we are seeing is really important.
But we can’t be dazzled by the graphics and the dramatic music forever. Sooner or later we understand that this is old news, or even non-news in the form of rumor, dressed in a new coat.
We are truly living in the age of a technology revolution in the communication industry. Perhaps, in the years ahead, we will arrive at the stage where the technical ability to communicate does not override or degrade the value of what is to be communicated.
Until that day arrives, the remote control is your best line of defense against that vast wasteland.
Mike Ellis is the editor of the Herald-Standard. His e-mail address is: mellis@heraldstandard.com.