Looking For the Bright Side

If anyone has been pulling a Rip Van Winkle and just been roused from their slumbers, let me point out that network nightly news is dead. Like the fabled Pythonian Norwegian Blue Parrot, it has shuffled off this mortal coil…it’s dead, deceased, no longer in meaningful or coherent existence. The days of Edward R. Murrow can’t be resuscitated by George Clooney movies. The Rather-Brokaw-Jennings axis was the last gasp of a dying phenomenon. With Rather discredited, Jennings deceased and Brokaw retiring, there’s little reason for anyone to tune in to the Big Three at Five.

Dislike him as I do, I must give credit to Ted Turner for bringing this about. His concept of TV in the AM radio model of full-time news source has worked. There’s no need to wait until we get home to find out what’s happening in the world. We can tune in any of half-dozen 24/7 cable news sources, choosing the one which feeds us our preferred flavor of news. If we can’t get enough that way, we can bounce our web page back to a news source and get updated. If that is too obvious for our cubicle-mates, we can simply add a news-crawl along the top or bottom of our browser while we perform more productive tasks. If something catches our eye we can be propagandized immediately without waiting until the half hour before dinner.

There’s a down-side, of course. There isn’t really enough significant news to fill 24/7. That means we find the reporting shifting into the instigating mode. We get a nation in thrall watching hours of a white Bronco cruise slowly down the California freeway, led and followed by dozens of police cars while being tracked by a fistful of helicopters trying to avoid a mid-air with each other. That wasn’t news. Ditto for the ensuing trial.

I don’t get much intellectual stimulation from the continuous banter of the anchor reporter rehashing the same tired bit of news over and over. When Cronkite went live for most of a day tracking the Kennedy assassination, it was epic. When anchors did similar marathon shifts as we landed on the moon, it was fascinating. When Shep Smith gets his carefully coifed locks windblown on the patio of a Biloxi Holiday Inn, it’s crap. I know that hurricanes have rain and wind. He can report from the studio and look better doing it.

But, now this: Nightly News Done Nicely?

Evidence that “they” just don’t get it. This isn’t going to save CBS News. Katie Couric has no street cred. She hasn’t been in the jungle with the Army grunts like Rather. She hasn’t hit the beach or roamed the battlefield. She hasn’t gotten her face pelted with the hurricane winds on live TV. She simply is cute and perky and makes funny faces when she’s shocked or surprised. She’s nice with eggs and orange juice in the morning.

What she isn’t, is penetratingly intellectual from any side of the political spectrum. She isn’t Tony Snow or Britt Hume. She isn’t George Will or Bill Buckley. She isn’t even Chris Matthews or Chris Wallace. She’s Oprah at an anchor desk.

The good news is that this is a wooden stake into the heart of the biased main-stream media network news vampire. This is tacit admission that they aren’t interpreters of complex events, but rather they are an entertainment half-hour that simultaneously spoon feeds us the proper political spin of their bosses. We now can know for certain that they aren’t to be taken seriously when they sort through a hundred significant events worldwide and then spend their sixteen minutes amid fourteen minutes of commercials telling us what is important.

In the heyday of network news we had avuncular figures like Cronkite telling us “that’s the way it is.” And, we believed them. They were strong and old and mature and wise. They sure as hell weren’t cute and perky. If we expect Katie to hold a weaseling politician’s feet to any sort of fire to get the truth, we will be very disappointed.