They Call This The News?

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/23/692/

They Call This The News?
by Jerry Lanson

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By the next morning, we could both laugh about my meltdown. But I was left to wonder just what had pushed my button so hard. It isn’t Steph that I was mad at; it is how far my profession, the news business, has fallen in this era of all-noise, all-the-time. Because no one should mistake 24-7 television with all-news, all-the-time. The McLaughlin Group, after all, is considered relatively refined as food fight journalism goes. It takes on serious issues. Most of its regular and guest commentators are well-established journalists.

Yet it’s format — you scream at me and I’ll scream back — wouldn’t be carried on European news channels, not on the BBC, not on France’s TV5 or even, from what I can tell, on local commercial French television. Television news in Europe may be a bit dull, but content still seems to count. From what I can tell through the barrier of language, political talk shows — and there’s a presidential election going on here today — are lively but still leave the speaker time to finish a sentence. Stories on the news tell not just about France, Iraq and the United States, but also about such places as Albania, Nigeria and Vietnam.

As it turns out, lots is happening in those places. But I doubt that half of my students in Boston could find them on a map, let alone discuss developments there. And with good reason. The U.S. media spends so much time examining America’s navel that it neither has the time nor inclination to look at the global body politic. (Nor, of course, in this era of profits and consolidation, does it much want to spend the money to do so.)

Ironically, in fact, all-news, all-the-time seems to have brought Americans less content and less knowledge of all serious topics, American and foreign, not more. It fills the airwaves and print websites with endless redundancy of information and endless opinion with little context. Consider the findings of a recent report from the Pew Center for the People and the Press. Released in mid-April, it found that, “on average, today’s citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago.”

Before, that is, the advent of the Internet and all-noise, all-the-time. A second look suggest that the words “about as able” paper over hints of a decline in knowledge. In 1989, the report notes, 74 percent of Americans were able to identify Dan Quayle, as lightweight a vice-president as has held the office in modern times. Today, just 69 percent of those polled could name Dick Cheney, arguably the most powerful vice-president in American history and a man, civil libertarians would argue, who has consistently consolidated power in the executive branch, often at the expense of constitutionally guaranteed checks and balances. In 1989, some 47 percent could identify the president of Russia. Today 36 percent can.

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