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When All-News Isn't Necessarily Good News by Tom Shales 
When All-News Isn't Necessarily Good News By Tom Shales Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, February 16, 2004; Page C01 "Feeding the Beast: The 24-Hour News Revolution" would probably be worth a peek even if it weren't particularly good. But it is particularly good, a swift but solid 90 minutes about one of the key media developments of our time. And the point, as host-producer Linda Ellerbee makes clear, is that it's much more than a media development. Global, 24-hour, instantaneous news has changed the world, and not necessarily for the better. Unfortunately those who run the machine don't have time to stop and ponder what frightening effects it might be having. They'd risk getting caught up in its gears, as Charlie Chaplin did in "Modern Times," which dealt with an earlier technological revolution. Ellerbee pops up on the Times Square Jumbotron screen, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and on TV monitors at many other locations in the report, premiering at 9 tonight on Trio, that smart and classy upstart of a cable network. Now available in about 20 million homes, including those with DirecTV or digital cable, Trio to its credit frequently dares to turn the great eye of television on itself, with programs that look seriously at the medium. Tonight's report asks whether the new information age and, especially, the role 24-hour news plays in it are not merely beasts but monsters -- the kind of creatures that always go roaring out of the lab in horror movies before they can be tamed and civilized, or perhaps cured of a tendency to eat people's heads off. Twenty-four-hour news became a reality in 1980 when Ted Turner, who is not a scholar but certainly no dope, dedicated the new CNN headquarters in Atlanta. Anchor Bernard Shaw tells Ellerbee that carpenters were still carpenting and roofers still roofing when CNN lurched into existence. Painters could be seen on the air, working in the background during telecasts from the newsroom. People laughed and scoffed. Even some CNN staffers ridiculed it as "Chicken Noodle News," partly for the chicken-feed wages that were being paid. But the last laugh, of course, was Turner's. His vision, like Edison's light bulb, lit up the world, even if its principal goal was to fill up Ted's bank account. He proved a prescient entrepreneur, to say the least. "The adventure of it was what appealed to me more than anything else," Turner claims in an interview. Katie Couric, the "Today" show star who got her start at CNN, remembers life at early CNN as "rock-and-roll city." A clip of young "Katherine Couric," cute as a cookie, doing a CNN report two decades ago shows what a novice she was. She remembers the news director of CNN, after seeing her debut, saying, "I never want that girl on the air again." In terms of presentation, CNN was woefully standard and free of innovation. What was new was that we saw news not only sometimes being made but even being gathered on the air. Viewers at home might know as much about a story as the anchor and reporter did, and learn new details -- factual or erroneous -- simultaneously. For CNN, the big breakthrough was Baghdad during the Gulf War, when Shaw went on the air by satellite merely to say, "Something is happening." He didn't know what, but he could hear booms in the distance. CNN couldn't afford to lure lots of big stars from other network news departments (though Turner was widely criticized in-house for throwing away big bucks on the oceanographic exploits of Jacques-Yves Cousteau). So the network created its own stars. Peter Arnett was surprised to find that when he left Baghdad, his exit was itself treated as a big story by other news organizations. Many years later, of course, Arnett was fired from a job at MSNBC for giving an interview to the Arab news network al-Jazeera as America was invading Iraq. He still seems to feel, in a brief interview clip, that he did nothing wrong, though what he said surely qualifies as comfort to the enemy, if not exactly aid. Once CNN had created its new kind of television and, more important to the fat cats who bankrolled it, showed it to be a new market for advertising, competition was bound to follow. CNN still tends to tower over those competitors, including MSNBC, CNBC and the Fox News Channel, where a conservative orientation colors what's covered and how Fox covers it. No one from Fox would agree to be interviewed for this report, Ellerbee says, because they assumed it would not be "fair and balanced," but she and her production team did have access to previously aired interviews. In one of them, Fox President Roger Ailes insists on "The Charlie Rose Show" that what makes Fox different is not that it espouses a political philosophy but that "we don't eliminate anybody's point of view." He implies the conservative viewpoint is omitted or banned or whatever on other networks. While many of those interviewed for "Beast" qualify as experts, there are also contributions from such dubious authorities as Jon Stewart and Janeane Garofalo. Stewart, recent Newsweek cover boy, has nothing clever to say and Garofalo, busily tucking her hair behind her ears, merely scoffs childishly at the news business. Perhaps they're both there in the name of comic relief, though they offer precious little of that. By contrast, veteran CBS News anchor Dan Rather voices serious concerns about the phenomenon. He laments that 24-hour news, with its insatiable appetite, competitive frenzy and rush-to-report, "has led to a dumbing-down, a tarting-up, a sleazing-up of news" on TV and has, in short, "lowered standards." The equally distinguished (if hardly as hard-working) Ted Koppel of ABC News says that the pressures of 24-hour news mean that "the focus is, or tends to be, on what is most recent rather than what is most important." In dedicating CNN, Turned hoped it would help satisfy "the thirst for understanding and a better life" in America. Has that been the effect, or even close? Ellerbee's thoughtful and vigorous report shows how far short of such goals 24-hour news has fallen -- and how it may have created more problems than it has solved. |