Infotainment and the Culture War

First, let me make clear that I am not one of those people who are constantly bashing the news media. I've worked in news at a local level, and I have found that most working reporters make every attempt to be fair and as objective as possible when writing their stories. A lot of handwringing goes on behind the scenes by reporters and editors over how to balance the people's need to know certain things in a democratic society against sensationalism and public interest. I heard one speaker on a conference panel entitled, "How We Get it Wrong as Journalists" say, "Can you imagine a panel at the American Medical Association conference entitled: 'Why do we kill so many patients?'"

Nor am I one who believes that the major media represent some sort of liberal or conservative conspiracy to hide or distort information. Again, you can find just about any political spin you want in the media.

No, I have respect for the members of the fourth estate. When they do their jobs right, they are criticized from both sides of the culture war for not reporting only their side of the issue. And they have to do their jobs under ever shortening deadlines making fact-checking and just basic writing more difficult.

What I want to address is not so much the reporting on the news as the way news is analyzed. News by itself is sometimes confusing. To tell the whole story one must put it into some sort of context. This means often interviewing people with differing interpetations of events. Fairness dictates that you need to allow different sides of controversial issues to present their interpretations and positions.

However, with the proliferation of cable news outlets, this attempt at balanced reporting often ends up being nothing more than a verbal fist fight between extremists with the moderators being referees and the network news organizations being little more than fight promoters. In journalism school we called this generating "more heat than light."

This brings us to the problem of "infotainment" a word which was coined to describe TV news programming which is mainly for the entertainment of the audience while presenting itself as news. At it's best, it can produce programs like 60 Minutes and 20/20. At it's worst it produces programs like Hard Copy, Scarborough Country and The Oreilly Factor. While I may enjoy watching these programs (even O'reilly sometimes), they hardly shed any real light on the subjects covered.

The typical show will bring together passionate proponents of different sides of a controversial issue to "discuss" it. Within a few minutes, the people are yelling at each other, interrupting one another, and trying to keep the others from talking. Often, the moderators are as bad as the participants joining one side or the other in the fight.

Certainly, this is amusing and entertaining. It really stirs the passions of the audience. You can root for the guy you agree with, and boo the one you don't like. But after the show is over what have you learned? Mostly, you have just been confirmed in your own belief on the subject without learning anything about the other side.

Perhaps more dangerous in this approach is that it reduces complex questions to a simple either/or proposition. Few issues are that simple. For instance, one might oppose the war in Iraq, as I do, but to simply pack up our bags and leave in the next 30 days is impossible at this point. However, that doesn't mean that a phased withdrawal over say 6 months couldn't work. When congressman Murtha proposed such a plan which was detailed and moderate, the debate was framed in the context of "get out now" vs. "stay the course." His plan called for the troops to be redeployed in the region where they could be called back when needed. There was no immediate abandonment of the mission, just a redeployment of the troops. Now one could argue the merits of such a plan, whether it would work or not, whether it is wise or not, but instead it was reduced to it simplest dynamic of "get out now, go home and ignore Iraq" which was not the entire plan.

We used to call television news "Talking Heads." Today, I'm afraid the cable news programs have turned that into "Yelling Heads." We need to reduce the volume and increase the analysis.