Chasing the News, Car Chases and Ratings

“The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.” — W.E.B. DuBois

When I look at the news from the so called “mainstream media,” I am mostly disappointed by the local news ―chasing sirens–car crashes, murders, attempted murders, suicides. We used to call this ambulance chasing. It all  started in the early 1990s. O.J. Simpson was in the backseat of Al Cowling’s white Ford Bronco, traveling northbound on the 405 freeway threatening to shoot himself in the head. Then the strangest thing happened. The chase was carried live and it seemed as if every eyeball was locked to a television screen. All the major TV stations were carrying the O.J. car chase. Soon, people started to show up along the side of the freeway to witness first hand the real live take down of a famous celebrity and former NFL football star. The TV ratings Soared. The die was cast and forever after an LA car chase has preempted all other news. 

This wasn’t really the beginning though. During the Second World War, famous broadcast journalist, Edward R. Murrow, gave nightly reports on the German bombings of London. Through the medium of radio, he gave the American listening audience true, accurate, and believable reports. The most renowned Librarian of Congress said of Murrow’s wartime dispatches: 

You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames that burned it. You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead, were mankind’s dead. You have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3,000 miles of water is not really done at all.

For this, Murrow and all of the reporters he brought with him became the most trusted journalists in America. They lived the war they reported on.

Today, we have newscasters who basically have never been in a war or covered a crime beat.  They’re just actors reading the news off a teleprompter. They’re not journalists. There is however a desire to get the real story.

Far from getting the real news we get “infotainment” these days. Or more accurately, “disinfotainment.” Sometimes they call it news, sometimes it’s Entertainment Tonight, gossipy tidbits about celebrities, and then “Reality TV” shows, which aren’t real at all.

The thing is people have become addicted to “reality TV” because it’s supposedly unpredictable and even more so it plays to people’s voyeuristic tendencies.

Perhaps because of this titillation, and the super low cost of producing “reality TV” shows, such content has increasingly dominated the airwaves. Now there’s a multitude of subgenres of reality television, from the Bachelor and Bachelorette from Survivor to The Apprentice. What this last show gave America is the phoniest of phony reality TV celebrities. If you’ve ever spoken with any of the production people in this area of work they will tell you, they are anything but reality and mostly staged but unscripted.  I guess the producers save on not hiring writers. This is what the critics call, “the dumbing down of the media.” Shooting for the lowest common denominator to entertain the masses not to enlighten or educate them, which is what the true promise of the medium is, but that which it is not. 

This is not unlike the Roman Colosseum where the masses could watch gladiators fight and kill each other or the Christians were fed to wild animals. There is still a fascination with violence in our culture that the media chases after to get the highest ratings – the car chase and crash, the gruesome murders. It is why people still watch boxing and mixed martial arts.  It’s part of why major league sports still draw a crowd. It’s the spectacle of it all and the potential spectacle of players getting hurt and injured.

The problem is none of this kind of reporting is as informative as the daily reports from alternative news sources like Democracy Now, RawStory, or the podcast interviews   on Background Briefing with Ian  Masters. All of which give more news in a contextual format and not just the car chase and the sexy weather girl who looks like she just stepped out of Vogue Magazine.

But all is not lost. When  real images of the reality on the ground in Gaza as Israel bombs Palestinian cities and refugee camps, young college students learn of the horrors of war, just as  my generation did during the Vietnam War. 

War is hell.  When it is seen, unvarnished with all the gore and real violence, people of conscience still respond, “Why the hell are we supporting crimes against humanity?”

This paper still holds to the words attributed to Mark Twain, “A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.”