shakran

Well, look back at the vietnam war. People were pretty quiet about it here at home until the TV started showing the bodybags being unloaded at the airforce bases. Then the protestors started getting very loud indeed.

I agree that news is largely crap (take notes, since I work in news) but not for the reasons you say. If anything the news needs to be more depressing. There's a lot of depressing shit happening right now. We just killed our 3,000th soldier in Iraq. The economy is in the toilet (I don't care what Bush says, just go down to your local Salvation Army and ask them how much demand for the food shelf has increased). A regional war is about to break out in the middle east. Bush is threatening to embroil us in yet another war (Iran). People are dying daily because they can't afford treatments that are available and could save their lives. And those are just a few examples of the crap that's going on in the world.

Yet what do we see on the nightly news? People diving into a frozen lake for fun on January 1st, christmas lights, a pet that does some cool trick, the first baby of the year, the last baby of last year, a man-on-the-street interview about new years resolutions, kids visiting Santa at the mall, last minute christmas shopping on the 24th, the grand opening of a donut shop, and other inane bullshit that's pushing the real issues right off the broadcast. And just so you know, all of those examples are stories I worked on in the last month, and I guarantee that someone at just about every station in the country did the same thing.

News is depressing? Yep, it sure is, because a lot of it just plain isn't news anymore.

Of course the flip side of that problem is that the American people feel they have a god given right to be happy 100% of the time. If something makes them unhappy, rather than trying to change it, they often sweep it under the rug. If the news is depressing then get the hell out there and make a difference - -change that situation so we have something good to report for once. But no, that's not the American way. The American way is to blame the news for reporting things we don't like.


And yet people gave Dan Rather shit about how "unprofessional" he was because he broke into tears after 9/11 on Letterman.

Now here we can come to an agreement I think. See, I think this forced neutrality in journalism is stupid (and that's made me rather a pariah amongst many of my colleagues). In the first place, who the hell do we think we're fooling. Of course we have opinions. We're humans, not robots.

We should absolutely report all sides of an issue, but I frankly don't see anything wrong with a commentary section of the broadcast - provided you clearly label it as commentary.

People are giving Katie Couric a lot of crap for the opinion section of her newscast. Frankly I think that's just about the only thing she's done right since she took the anchor chair.

Let's not forget that it was Murrow's commentary that took down Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunt. It was Cronkite's commentary that finally convinced the president that America was not behind the Vietnam war. He began shutting it down almost immediately. Yet today we shy away from commentary. Oh my god somebody might think we're biased! So the hell what? So we're biased. If we're biased we probably have a damn good reason for it.

Now, in order to do this right we have to move journalism back to the way it was under Murrow and Cronkite. Cronkite didn't just sit at his anchor desk pontificating on a war he'd never visited. He went over to Vietnam, several times, and the last time he traveled all over the country (not just where the military wanted him to go) to see for himself what was going on, then prepared reports on it, and THEN told us what he thought.

Today we have "embedded" journalists running around in Iraq, going only where the military wants them, seeing only what the military wants them to see. So frankly we're not qualified to give you a commentary on how the Iraq war is going. We don't see what's really happening. We need another Cronkite to come in, tour the country on his own, see what's going on, and tell us about it.

But that would cost money and news is decidedly for-profit now. We get better ratings by interviewing last night's American Idol loser and telling you about Britney Spears not wearing panties.

It all boils down to corporate ownership. We've let 5 major corporations own the majority of the media outlets in this country. GE doesn't give a crap about good journalism, all they want to see is huge profits coming in from ALL their divisions. It's a lot more expensive to send a reporter to Iraq on his own (Rather than being cared for and fed by the military) than it is to get paparazzi video of celebrities without underwear.

What's the solution? Break up the journalistic monopolies. 5 megacorporations should not be dictating what we see on the news each night. Democracy cannot survive without a feisty and independent press acting as a watchdog to government.

We do that, and stop insisting that news rake in 30% profits every year, and we'll start to see some genuinely good changes not just in journalism, but in the rest of the country as officials realize they're now being watched.