There is nothing easier than complaining about TV news, except maybe complaining about the weather or commercial radio. Some like to blame the “broadcast journalists,” but we stopped calling them that years ago. Honestly, why continue to expect wisdom from the mouths of babes? Besides, it is not the newsreaders’ fault, and it is not even their editors’ fault, nor the news director’s, nor the general manager’s. It is the public itself that wants what it gets, and in a competitive markeplace, pandering is an indispensible tool. Some people really ought to know this better than others.
The gold standard for this war of the higher and lower selves was the death of Diana years ago—remember the self-loathing press that, on the one hand, camped at the doors of the morgue, while at the same time publishing reems of complaint and apology for doing it? When we blamed the paparazzi for killing Lady Di, we were actually blaming ourselves. When we retched at the tabloid coverage, we wretched into the newspaper we had just bought. The press wanted a look because the public wanted a look, and all the moralizing was simply folded right into the overnight coverage. Likewise, if half the people who loudly complain about pornography actually stopped using it privately, the business would slow to a trickle.
From a media consumer’s point of view, the real problem with “over studied,” focus-grouped, service-oriented magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio programming, is the slow leeching away of surpise and revelation. It’s not that big a deal, but if you give the people what they want one hundered percent of the time, they’ll never get anything fresh, offbeat, informative, inspiring, delightful. It’s rather like a political leader who does nothing until he has consulted the latest poll; that’s not leading, it’s following. (Which is one of the reasons we get so incensed about the relentless polling of Americans regarding their feelings about gay marriage. How many ante-bellum Southerners supported abolition? Real progress often requires leaders to lead without the affirmation of overwhelming public support. Real regression, by the way, can happen WITH a slight popular consensus.)
Some media companies want to make boatloads of money; other media companies want to do good and substantive and memorable work. Let’s not be silly about confusing the two.
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