Part of public grammar school, undeniably, is a certain amount of indoctrination. Just in case you don’t have parents at home to drill these foundations into you, teachers very pronouncedly reference certain lifestyle structures that are certainly good ones, like having dinner with one’s family at night, proper diet and bedtime habits, etc. But there’s one lifestyle reference that came up more than often, which in our home, for some reasons, we never did. We never all sat around the TV in the evening and watched the news together, and discussed it in the process.
It's not as though there was ever any lack of educational lecture and analysis in our home, of the international political and economic scene of the time, which couldn’t be afforded enough public classroom focus due to lessons on King Tut. And at home, I was equipped personally with one of the most articulate and knowledgeable teachers possible. No license or degree, but boy, could she teach. My mother, by middle age, had no matriculated college background to speak of, but after a life of various secretarial jobs, in between reading every printed word in the bookstores, devouring English Literature, and absorbing every political journal of the 1950s and 60s as a statistician knows numbers, her eloquent and passionate grasp of Israel’s plight could not for one moment be doubted. I was her sole pupil.
My mother bore no respect for the commercial television news presentations of our time. She looked upon those ad-filled, star-studded blocks as the ultimate bastardization of what once was, in the time of Edward R. Murrow, the Great White Hope.
At some point, when those recurring classroom drops about parent-child news viewing and “family discussion” finally got to me, I asked my mom……”Why don’t we actually watch the news…?”
Somehow, in our home anyway, the thought of making a point to sit in front of the TV and watch a nightly newscast of any sort was akin to dining on salt and pepper as a main course. News was not a focal point of tune-in viewing. It was just “on” all the time, ubiquitously. If your TV was on non-stop, as our Magnavox black-&-white portable was in our little 1978 abode, TV news just sort of wallpapered the room in one way or another, with mid-day news briefs, updates and the like. Long before things like CNN. From the time I was three, raised at first in my uncle’s home, I already knew who all the big flagship-station news anchors were: Jim Jensen, Walter Cronkite, Roger Grimsby, John Chancellor. Invariably, a portion of the evening newscasts were always purring out of the TV at or after dinnertime. No one was necessarily riveted to it, but the car and soda jingles were fun to sing along to before Animal World came on.
Those iconic impresarios, the dapper “stars” of the Evening News, were the undeniable décor of our lives. But how much of these showcases truly served up any kind of genuine recommended nutritional value..? And that was my erudite mother’s pseudo-intellectual exception taken with the nightly news on the dial. My inquest was met with a dissertation that expressed favor of print news, such as The New York Times, over such eye candy as ABC World News Tonight.
Where’s the inquisitive study on these pocket-sized stories we’re pelted with..? How do we objectively identify figures associated with a story without employing some perfunctory sense of pre-emptive bias..? Is there a generalized slant relative to anything other than a need to shut up and get the commercials on..?
It was in the 1980s when my high school journalism class was visited by a guest speaker, a local television newscast producer. He was asked by a pupil what forces the decision on stories chosen, citing the story just the night before of a young girl shot to death in Harlem, which two competing newscasts featured in ten second reads. This fellow’s presentation did not. The producer went on to explain the applied science of “disposable stories”, relied upon for the purpose of filling that spare ten broadcast seconds. A good many of those ten-second tragedy reports are unsurprisingly dropped at broadcast time, in order to clear the headline story: The President arrived in the city today, to eat barbecued ribs at an event, and discuss the missile budget.
And the sports..! Don’t forget the sports. For all my mother cared, the obsession with sports reporting in a male-dominated sports obsessed culture (it certainly was then..) did not belong in a respectable newscast. Was she wrong..?
In the 1960s, pressure was put upon CBS News Director Fred Friendly to have a sponsored Heywood Hale Broun sports commentary segment installed at the end of each night’s Walter Cronkite CBS Evening News. Broun was uniquely prolific as a sports analyst. But, as Friendly held, as it was, there was just barely enough time on any night to read and present every relevant piece of national news For reasons not entirely unrelated in principle, Friendly departed the network a couple of years later.
My mother did not rely upon television newscasts, or “news shows” in order to stay informed. If some story was breaking, TV is where we saw and heard about it. But then, my mom would follow it in The New York Times, as well as the in-depth documentary and discussion offerings of public television. To her, a commercial television newscast was an improper travesty in too many ways. And it was for this fundamental reason, that the evening news time periods that have long defined post-war video-culture Americana served as alarms In our home, reminding us to switch the dial promptly, to a channel serving up something of genuine viewing value, an independent station presenting movies or favorite old TV show re-runs. No ritual is more recollective to my childhood than the nightly call from the kitchen upon the peal of that “Coming up next on Eyewitness News..” tease after The ABC Friday Night Movie, to “…put on The Odd Couple..!”, over on Channel 11, perhaps New York's highest rated TV presentation in that time slot back then.
And it was in those pre-adolescent, indulgent times, that along with the jumbo bowl of Heavenly Hash ice cream on Friday and Saturday nights, the extra cookies I knew I’d soon need to give up if I wanted to lose that critical hemisphere waistline once and for all, it was that aversion to those formally dressed, formally produced, formally spoken, mature and often demure presentations that left me in some state of irresponsible, indulgent guilt: Am I some ignorant news slacker..?
Taking the focus off the self-destructive self for just one moment, let’s ask some better questions. Why for the last sixty years have so many off-network series in re-sale, many less than initially successful in prime time, made such lucrative hay for independent television stations, who have long used them on a nightly “strip” basis to directly counterprogram the news broadcasts on the network-affiliated stations..? Is there in fact a significant, and in many cases, highly educated audience craving alternative to the news we all “should” be watching nightly ..?
Meanwhile, just how deeply integral are those local and network television news structures..? It was the late, great Fred Friendly and his industry contemporaries that came out of the influence of radio news in the War Era, when a news presentation, report or commentary, focused on the story, the matter, the purpose. A story’s headline coverage had nothing to do with whether or not the sunset in the next few minutes will destroy the story because it won’t hit the reporter’s coiffed hair on camera just so. There was no “star system”, no six-part lifestyle reports, no meaty opportunities for team network reporters politically vying to get that mostly disposable report of theirs from the Honduras, the reporter in his slick beige military duds, hair blowing like a Calvin Klein ad, the piece placed just seconds away from a break beginning with….a Calvin Klein ad..!
It's conclusively possible that a half hour of The Odd Couple, The Honeymooners, or even The Benny Hill Show would offer just as much insight into the globe’s collective challenges as something akin to an ego-covered pageant that slaps one’s intelligence in the face.
And nearly fifty years after the cultivation of the "news slacker", we've got something much more contemporary and chic, en route to it's Golden Anniversary: The "news junkie". The exponential harvest of electronic news-presentation platforms over nearly the last fifty years has reformulated that substance long known as "news" into literally a highly, and in some ways toxic, addictive substance. Its properties take on nearly an entirely separative function in the content's embrace of the neurocortex. The viewer is transformed almost into William Hurt's portrayal of the experimental figure in Altered States. Ironically, that very paranormal tale was penned by Paddy Chayefsky, the visionary who brought us that bizarre scarefest in 1976 called Network.
It's possible that Network itself has not yet seen it's fiction become straight reality, if for no other reason, too many people still remember the movie. But in the forty-plus years since it's premiere, we've come close enough to the goal posts.
I won't soon forget that afternoon in 1980 at the bus stop with my mom. I was all of eleven, living in one of those cable-deprived homes, relegated to simply reading the listings of all those curious pay-TV treats in the following week's TV Guide, which I scored us at the newsstand. The centerfold was a handsome, glossy, 24-hour breakdown of program listings for the all-new Cable News Network. Much of it by half-hour flaunted "News Headlines". By 3AM of any day, I had to wonder.......how much developing news is there going to be from one half-hour to the next. I'd heard of little ten-minute newscasts from the announcer before a TV station signed off after the late movie, but wouldn't these people quickly run out of presentable news...? What's the plan...?? I talked about this with my fairly unimpressed mom.
Her prophetic, and moderately sardonic observation: "I guess they'll have to invent some news of their own..."
Long before Daniel Boorstin coined the term "pseudo-event" of course, the practice itself could date back to biblical times. As wise people have told me, the world existed before we got here. The immense harvesting of "news networks" and "news services" cannot subist solely on that one elusive, natural source. Man has to step in and manufacture some. It's just part of the business that's good for business that's good for America.
If it’s saints one is looking for in broadcast journalism, the on-camera pontiffs themselves, the former Cronkites, the Chancellors, Reasoners, Smiths, and their integral disciples don’t really hold water. They have daily jobs. They work for people who work for people, who will claim, in all conceivable honesty to work for The People. The viewer. They who voluntarily view. It’s an endless chase of the proverbial tail.
And the question of integrity in commercial broadcast news gathering and presentation is anything but new. Again, contributors to The Bible in their time just might have been able to tell you a few industry stories. And none of this is to in any way negate or dismiss the masterwork of those who have brought us the most distinguished coverages in the last seventy years of the assassinations, shuttle explosions, storm disasters, and each and every broadcast employee who put their adrenal impulses aside to keep us informed on 9-11.
It is, sadly and ironically, such disaster that ends up redeeming an aerobic biosphere that feeds off its own money-generating capacity in order to survive and exist.
Ron Powers probably thought he was blowing a significant lid off the industry when his literary creation, a study titled The Newscasters hit the stationary store pulp racks in the late 1970s. By then of course, the video epidemic was common knowledge. Powers' book was basically an excoriation of the Age Of Ron Burgundy upon us. How did local Station Managers and News Directors deal with the critics’ charge upon this reality…? Astute businessmen that they were, many held, quite valiantly, that they were providing their core audience with just what they wanted to see at the end of the day. Viewers knew what they wanted too. If you can make the veggies yummy enough, people won’t pass them up for the pudding. From a culinary standpoint, news was good when it was delicious. In a world of expanding local news afternoons, days and evenings, no one can pass up a smorgasboard.
Ever wonder if those once-guilty treats can now be appreciated decades later, in a semi-historical context..? In recent years, all those journalistically substandard half-hours benevolently uploaded on line by like spirits, absorbed with history and nostalgia of times past, have allowed this disciple, pining for the simplicity of youth eras prior, to take an invaluable ride. A thirty-minute excursion, commercials, continuity and all can resurrect one’s fascination and desire to go back to that innocent, news-switching youth just briefly. A different time. A different place. The one we know best. Can an old relic find precious antique value..? I’ll let you know when I’m done with it for the first time.
Noah F.
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