Somewhat over a year ago my wife, Patricia, announced to me: “I’ve had it with television news programs.” From that point on, she hasn’t watched a single one. Don’t get me wrong; it is not that she doesn’t keep up with the news; we receive three daily newspapers at the house (The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Atlantic City Press), which she and I both read rather thoroughly.
The reason she threw up her hands and shuttered off the TV is explained almost to a “T” in an opinion piece Nov. 24 in the Wall Street Journal by Crispin Sartwell, a teacher at Dickinson College, entitled, “The Modern Epic of Denunciation — The media drives the story, but Americans are all caught up in the moral drama.”
Sartwell writes, “We seem to have entered a period of nonstop mutual denunciation. This is particularly useful to the media, which can fill pages and airtime with nonevents that reporters and pundits invent and then cover.
”People have quickly cultivated the skill. It once took 48 hours for a politician to castigate a member of his own party for ancient harassment or an untoward tweet. Yet Democratic condemnations of Al Franken began flowing within minutes of the story’s breaking. It became a sort of competition, a contest of moral appearances. Some even condemned Mr. Franken for his own condemnation of Harvey Weinstein. Well, who demanded that scripted hypocrisy from him in the first place?
“Pundits speculate that Republicans would prefer Roy Moore to lose his Senate race because, if he wins, he will be hung around their necks for years. They will be called upon repeatedly to denounce him, repudiate him, distance themselves from him…”
“Suppose that Person X makes an inappropriate remark, and you are a news director charged with covering the story. By itself, it’s liable to fade pretty quickly, yet there are 24 hours of live updates to fill.
“But there is hope: Did President Trump denounce the remark by Person X? Did he do so quickly enough? Did he do so in the rigidly mechanical terms demanded? What about Senator Y? Did he denounce it full-throatedly? Did he say, verbatim, that “’this is not who we are as Americans’”?
At this point, this “story” has morphed into something with a life of its own. “Every minute that Mr. Trump or Senator Y fails to produce the denunciation constitutes a new and troubling development. But then we have a question for Governor Z: Does he condemn Mr. Trump’s failure to condemn Person X’s remark? Why does he think Senator Y, an old friend, is taking so long? How about Movie Star A? Did he condemn the non-condemnation?”
At this point, the newsperson heads to the streets, but not to get the news but to find a celebrity who will appropriately condemn or not condemn; either works.
“This does strike me as a fairly new phenomenon, at least the thoroughness with which it is now being prosecuted. The people doing the reporting—CNN is particularly adamant about this—insist they are merely providing facts: It is an objective truth that Mr. Trump hadn’t condemned Mr. Moore, or that some senator hadn’t repudiated Mr. Trump’s non-condemnation.”
What is happening is “a contest to see who condemns whom, first, hardest, and with the most clichés…”
In summation, Mr. Sartwell asks, are we addressing a real problem in all of this? To me, it is all blather to fill up the airtime and sway the audience in one direction or the other. The longer you watch, the more advertisements you see, and the more money the network takes in.
When I was young, the national TV news lasted for 15 minutes; now it is 24-7. Is there that much more of substance to relate? Or is it as Sartwell outlines? A genuine newsperson might be able to tell us what happened in 15 minutes, but it takes a crafty person to play with our minds and hold our attention while merely fabricating a narrative.
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