Last week, Al Gore told CNN that one of the problems with our discourse is the media’s obsession with “trivialities.” As Gore sees it, the “line between entertainment and news is now very blurred…. And so we get a lot more of Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral arrangements and Paris Hilton’s legal battles on her jail term than we get about how we can solve the climate crisis and how we can get our troops out of this civil war they are trapped in, in Iraq.”
Right on cue, Faiz noted this gem from CNN this morning.
Confirming the central thesis of Al Gore’s criticism of the media, this morning CNN announced the hire of a new reporter who will “be covering things like Britney, as well as the Michael Jackson memorabilia”:
KIRAN CHETRY: Britney Spears, she’s blogging — that’s what they do these days, the celebrities — about her trip to rehab, about hitting rock bottom, and about what she really thinks her troubles are…. And joining us to talk more about that this morning is Lola Ogunnaike…. You’re going to be covering things like Britney, as well as the Michael Jackson memorabilia.
OGUNNAIKE: Yes, I’ve got the Britney, Lindsay, Michael Jackson memorabilia beat.
Keep in mind, CNN has already been offering plenty of coverage of various celebrities and their personal lives — Lola Ogunnaike was hired to “report” on these people exclusively. In other words, CNN decided that its current team wasn’t sufficient; it needed a celebrity beat reporter to do nothing but inform the public about “Britney, Lindsay, [and] Michael Jackson memorabilia.”
I guess CNN isn’t exactly taking Gore’s advice to heart.
Atrios said something last week that stuck with me.
The problem is not that there is celebrity news or sports news, the problem is when trivial stories dominate the entire news narrative. That almost never happens with sports, which gets little coverage on cable news or Matt “Rules Their World” Drudge. The problem isn’t that there’s a sports section in your newspaper, the problem is when unimportant stuff bleeds into the regular coverage.
I think this is right, though I’m just stuffy enough to suggest that major news outlets could probably stand to give up on most of its celebrity news, by at least 90%. (They could start by sticking to actual celebrities. Who on earth is Anna Nicole Smith?)
But Atrios’ larger point is spot on — the real problem with the media’s poor judgment is pushing trivia in lieu of real news. They allow (read: encourage) nonsense to dominate in such a way as to obscure stories that people actually need to know about.
When CNN was first created, most journalism purists were thrilled. Finally, they said, there would be 24 hours of news coverage. There’d be time for the fluff, but there’d also be time for detailed reports on news that might otherwise go unmentioned. The network newscasts only get an hour; CNN would offer 24 times as much!
Except, as we know, it didn’t quite work out that way. It’s simply become proportional — whereas some celebrity nonsense would get a few minutes of World News Tonight, it now gets hours of coverage, with frequent updates, throughout the day on CNN, MSNBC, and FNC.
That CNN has hired someone to cover “Britney, Lindsay, Michael Jackson memorabilia” is not a surprise; that the network didn’t already have someone on this beat is.
Reason #1,684,351 why I do not watch television news.