I have recently come into possession of a “book.” Contrary to the stereotype of TV critics as illiterates, I even began to read it, after a brief time trying to figure out how to turn it on and flinging it across the room angrily while making ape noises.
The book is Reality Show, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz’s tome about the recent network news wars of Brian, Charlie and Katie (and Dan, and Diane, and Elizabeth…). It’s what I think of as an “index book”–you get it, look through the index for the choice bits of gossip you’ve heard about in the carefully-crafted pre-publication leaks, then forget the book existed.
Other people have already written about the dirt, if you care about that. I’m more interested in the context: why should you read a book about the travails of newscasts that you very likely never watch anymore? And why should any of us care whether there’s a way to save them?
Kurtz doesn’t deny that the newscasts are foundering. Far from it: though he grew up watching the news,
A few short years ago I realized that I was increasingly missing the network newscasts, for reasons that were all too familiar. I got home too late, or was busy making dinner, or was distracted by a dozen other things. When I had the set on, I realized that I already knew the details of the top stories and often clicked it off. Sometimes I was on the computer, where any story, it seemed, was at my fingertips within seconds.
I was losing the habit.
This is in the introduction. Two pages in, we have learned that even the guy who wrote the freaking book can, sensibly, hardly be bothered to watch the evening news anymore. Only 440 pages to go! Sign me up!
It’s an admirable admission, but it raises the question of why we should care that network newscasts are passing through irrelevance on the way to extinction. In the analytical wrap-up to Reality Show, he offers a version of the usual why-they-still-matter line:
They are still the biggest tent in the media village, still explaining the world–a few chunks of it, anyway–to those too busy to be surfing the Net or watching cable all day. They have the power to cut through the static and give a story a national profile. And because their divisions are essentially constructed to support them, they set the pace for the other network news shows.
I guess it’s true, in the sense that rabbit ears still matter because some people still don’t have cable. But mainly this seems like a tautology: the evening news still matters because it used to matter. Can they “cut through the static”? I tend to doubt it, and in any event they don’t, for reasons Kurtz lays out: they have fewer resources and less airtime, they make safe, near-identical choices, and they are losing viewers because of social and demographic changes there is absolutely no way to reverse–not at 6:30 p.m. anyway. And “other network news shows”? Those would be The Early Show? To Catch a Predator?
Kurtz’s final argument–that the big anchors are “national explainers” in an “info-saturated age”–is the least convincing. I’ve never bought the idea that having fragmented audiences get their news from more sources is bad. Look at online news: the atomized, fragmented masses can choose to get their news from wherever they want, and sure, plenty of them choose Drudge (who after all, mainly links to MSM sources anyway). But what has the anarchic mob chosen to make the most popular newspaper online? The New York Times, arguably the best newspaper in the country–now more widely read than ever–and in any case hardly an example of “info saturation” dumbing down the culture.
Yes, the big news anchors provided a central gathering place for Americans in times of crisis and big news, but (1) that’s a fairly brief era in historical terms and (2) why, exactly, was most Americans getting the same information from monolithic sources a good thing? (Ahem, my editors don’t read this blog, right?)
Should news gathering be improved, preserved and kept relevant? Of course. Does it need to be preserved in the form of half-hour broadcasts by millionaires at 6:30? Of course not. This is not, by the way, a damnation of Kurtz, or even a review of his book. Because in the end I read his introduction and analysis and flipped through Reality Show for the juicy bits. In the end, that was all I really cared about, and that’s not Howard Kurtz’s fault. But it is the network news’ problem.