I was searching the vast cable universe for a place to park, and watch something engaging on a Sunday night. To my surprise my wife suggested the IFC channel’s Media Project.. Its brief thirty minute show, and it was worth watching. Its a program about “The News,” and subjects related to covering news, news content, and production.
I enjoyed the profile about the journalist who threw a shoe at President Bush. The show explores interesting issues in media, from ethics, to news stereotypes. In a cartoon feature called “the news junkie,” IFC explored the top 5 reasons people hate local news. The countdown talked about those annoying “news teases.” That’s right, those one-liners announcing upcoming segments. Problem is, why tell me about a future segment on the danger in food, (for example) just tell me what that danger is, NOW!
Then there’s the “news crawl.” You know that annoying line on the bottom of your screen. Most of those headlines are misleading, redundant, and wrong! Number One in the countdown went to news media scare tactics. Information that’s high on shock value, low on content.. This is evident in the repetition of dooms-day scenarios from the Y-2K threat, to the Swine Flu.
It’s so easy to sit, watch, and laugh at the media. Broadcast news deserves the ridicule. After all news consultants have, (like some botched lab project) cut, shaped, and tinkered with the format so long that the medium has turned on them. Call it the revenge of the mutant news format, or something like that.. The very same formulas that were supposed to bring viewers to the screen are repelling viewers.
Tell us your favorites. Ever since Don Henley came out with “Dirty Laundry” in the 80’s local news has been the butt of jokes. Cloned newscasts popped up all over the country, and engaged in “the clone wars.” Everyone started doing exactly the same thing because news stations were trying to out-do each other. If one station had a weather dog, other stations jumped in. If one station’s lead story was a car crash, or murder, the others tried to top that. I remember once hearing a news manager say “I hope we have a good car crash with lots of victims, we need a good lead story today.” This was in response to a typical no-news day.
So we come back to square one. How do we fix the problem? Firing all the consultants? In response to that news manager wishing for a car crash, how about covering the community we live in. News outfits have long relied on cheap news to fill the hours of programming. Instead of filling an hour, why not just fill a program with great content without time constraints. This exists on the web. People are downloading the news they want on-demand without the trappings of a format, or those fluff pieces in between.
