Television News Broadcasts
I just finished rereading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. One of the comments he makes (I tried to find a direct quote, but can't locate it in the book) is that the television media is not at its most dangerous and counter-productive when it is absurd and foolish and entertaining; it is most deadly when it attempts to be serious.His premise is that the television is, by nature, an instrument of entertainment, and is not well suited to any other kind of usage. Thus, the most useless, counter-productive, and dangerous television programs are not "Saturday Night Live", "NYPD Blue", and "Everybody Loves Raymond". The most dangerous uses of the television are: "The 700 Club", "Sesame Street", political advertisements and debates, and news broadcasts.
In these examples, television attempts to intrude itself in arenas it is not at all suited for: religion, education, politics, and news reporting. This may seem surprising, but Postman presents some very solid arguments to support his hypothesis.
To take the case of news broadcasts, Postman's premise is that television news broadcasts (with a few exceptions which are watched by virtually no one) are carefully crafted and designed to be "entertainment", because if it is not "entertaining", no one will watch it (which tends to prove his point that no one watches the "real" news broadcasts, which get relegated to the public television networks).
Like any other television entertainment, news broadcasts have background music designed to captivate attention and heighten tension. Like any other television entertainment, news broadcasts are populated by "beautiful" people. Like any other television entertainment, news broadcasts are more concerned with the "appearance of truth" than with truth itself. Thus, a newsbroadcaster who does not (according to polls) appear "convincing" to the viewer, is doomed. In other words, appearance is more important than substance, which is one of the consistent marks of television entertainment.
I think, though, that one of his most compelling arguments is that the news broadcast is designed for short sound bites and visual bites that even the most inattentive person can follow; the average news story is summarized in seconds, with virtually no time available for details and analysis.
Postman argues that, in the days before television, news was received by newspaper, and people would spend not seconds, but minutes, perusing a single news story, getting all the details in order to develop an informed opinion, but now the television news viewer only has seconds to evaluate and consider before the anchor is saying "Now...this", and moving on to something completely different, leaving the viewer no opportunity to consider or analyze.
Postman reports that one study conducted indicates that when people watch a television news broadcast, within minutes of the end of the broadcast, 51% of viewers cannot remember one single news item that they just watched.
Postman argues that there are essentially two reasons for this terrible statistic:
1. Since the networks can obtain information from all over the world, "news" programs choose to present irrelevent stories which "play well" over information which will be pertinent to the viewer.
2. No news item, whether pertinent or not, is given enough time to make an impression on the viewer.
This makes me think of my sixth grade class, in which every day at noon, the teacher would flip on the television, and we would watch the ten minute news update, and then take a five question quiz about what we had just seen. I always hated that - not because I found the news uninteresting, but because I never did well on those quizzes.
And now that I think about it, I realize the reason is exactly what Postman suggests; the current events broadcast was ten minutes of irrelevent sound bites painted with too broad a brush to ever make an impression on my mind.
Posted On Jun 1, 2005 at 4:24 AM
On Jun 1, 2005 Laura wrote: I've never relied on the TV for my news either, frankly because I always felt the broadcasts were simply trying to manipulate the viewer. I think so many people believe them just because people are so used to believing what they see over what they hear, but now we can't even do that anymore.
On Jun 2, 2005 WOW wrote: Are you having a backwards day?
Doug Replied: ha ha...you must be referring to my "Patio de Recreo" logo at the top of the screen? Yeah, I decided I would flip that around backwards, just to be...
odd.
On Jun 2, 2005 Beth wrote: Well, you didn't have to flip the logo for us to know that....;-)
Doug Replied: har har har.
On Jun 4, 2005 Doug wrote: I thought I'd add this quote by Hermann Hesse, which I just stumbled across:
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
I think that's a very interesting perception. Written language gives permanence to ideas and facts in a way which the image-driven television media cannot. True, we can give permanence to it by recording it on a video cassette, but that isn't really permanence, because information provided in that format is not designed for easy retrieval; seeking a single fact in the deluge of triviality which is television is worse than finding a needle in a haystack.
Even this site, which has its own trivialities (like backwards logos!), because it is centered around the written word, is a searchable resource for the public.
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