According to American TV journalists, there have been quite a few major upsets during this campaign season. When Obama won Iowa, then Hillary won New Hampshire, the pundits’ heads were spinning because apparently those results didn’t fit into what they had predicted. They were wrong because it’s not a journalist’s job to make political predictions.
Predicting the future is for Nostradamus, lunatic psychics and weathermen, not serious journalists. That, however, is the state of American journalism. My good friend Farmer Macgregor, who worked at The Boston Globe for seven years, sums up modern television journalism as groups of reporters sitting around interviewing each other about speculation. If you’ve ever drowned yourself in a days worth of TV news, then you know that to be true.
Whenever an anchor drags out an analyst from another news source to make an assessment about what’s happening and what will happen, then feel free to abandon that moral obligation of watching the news, because at that point you are no longer watching news. You’re watching a telethon where showmen work to fill the space between the Geritol ads.
After the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, reporters were surprised at how little the Jeremiah Wright controversy had affected the Obama campaign. And why shouldn’t they be surprised? Major news outlets like CNN, MSNBC and ABC all went into overkill mode over a story that really only matters to idiots and conspiracy nuts.
It’s a sign that these news outlets are becoming less relevant and less impacting, and it’s completely their own fault.
The 24-hour news cycle has perpetuated the wave of shallow information that we are daily bombarded with. There is so much empty space to fill that every tiny incident becomes news, and stories that appeal to people on a base level get recycled over and over. It’s like rubbernecking through a car wreck; we can’t stop watching. The story of the man in Austria who kept his daughter in a secret bunker for 24 years has run its course to the point where MSNBC started showing how the bunker was built. Surely that’s news.
They’ve replayed the story of the sinkhole in Texas so much that I’ve concluded it has to be the hole where Satan escapes to earth to enslave the human race. Why else would they show a hole over and over? It’s a hole.
If that’s what you get when you watch the news, you might as well just go hang out at Gentleman Jim’s and listen to a couple drunks rant while slurping down their Styrofoam cups of whiskey.
It’s not like that if you watch the BBC. I don’t mean to ride the “America is dumb” wave, but the English make news for people who can comprehend the news. You don’t get the sense that you’re being talked to like a child. Then again, if you’re buying half the nonsense of American pop journalism, you probably are child. So, there’s my journalistic prediction: the greatest news network of the future will be Nickelodeon, and we’ll get our updates on the war in Iraq from a Katie Couric covered in green slime.
