Right message, wrong messenger

June 9, 2007

Take a wild guess who shared these words of wisdom during a recent commencement address (via Jonathan Schwarz):

“While it’s wonderful to have the world literally at our fingertips, the tsunami of information at our beck and call has the potential to drown us and actually make us less informed…. Surfing the web may be fast and fun, but sometimes pursuing knowledge requires you to go in the deep end — and not just dip your toe in the shallow water. […]

“The proliferation of celebrity magazines makes Lindsey Lohan’s latest stint in rehab seem more important than what’s happening in Darfur.

The kind of fluff that accosts us on the newsstand may seem like harmless fun, but it should also come with a warning label that says it can rot your mind and distort your values.”

The words of Al Gore? Bill Moyers? Eric Alterman?

Try Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News, who would appear to have some power over how the mind-rotting fluff is reported to a national audience.

I have to say, Couric’s remarks at Williams College last week sound encouraging, but they would be far less breathtaking if they matched her journalism. On Thursday night, the CBS Evening News’ top story was Bush and Putin discussing missile defense, to which the network devoted two minutes and 35 seconds. The next longest item was Paris Hilton’s release from jail, which garnered two minutes and 25 seconds.

During the half-hour broadcast, the Paris Hilton “news” got more coverage on CBS than a roadside bomb killing a U.S. soldier, the immigration legislation, and passage of the stem-cell bill combined — times two.

Please tell us again, Katie, about how the media exaggerates the significance of celebrity nonsense.

Do as I say, not as I do…

  • is she a stone-cold hypocrite or is she completely oblivious? i don’t think there’s a third choice.

  • As long as anyone listens to the exploits of the rich and useless, they will dominate the news/entertainment shows. News is a business which means profit making which means the exploits of the nimbly dumb.

  • It is a bit odd, but it’s also good advice – that for people to be good citizens, then need to dig below the surface, go into detail. That her news program doesn’t do this doesn’t really make her hypocritical because it is, after all, 30 minutes of nightly news – there is only so much she can cover. Sure, she can cover the more important news, but then people turn the channel, and she might as well not bother when CBS cancels her program because she’s not covering Paris Hilton enough. The audience needs to demand depth and intelligence for her to be able to do it.

    Ultimately, unless we find a way to make the news-media not a profit-driven venture, she’s stuck being a McDonalds executive telling people to eat their vegetables. The reality is that McDonalds starts serving salads when that is what the customer wants and when there is a profit to be had.

  • Let me work off of Howard’s comment (#2) to offer at least a possible defense of Couric, because there is a third possibility: maybe, just maybe, she is aware of the change in the last 20 years to news-as-entertainment, news as profit center, news as advertisement for other programs, and while within CBS her power is limited to do anything dramatic about it (the bosses argue ‘give the people what they want – bread and circuses’) on the lecture circuit she can try to get the public to say they really want some meat to their news.

    I honestly don’t know where Katie really stands on the hard news versus fluff issue, but were someone willing to be the messenger, there is some logic to why she does what she does on TV and says what she says “on the stump.” The logic is that the CBS suits pay her to sell – her legs, the advertisers products, the corporate owners’ politics – not to push back. She may be their well-paid anchor, but the last few years have proven nothing if not that even anchors, once a bedrock position, are now as expendable as anyone else on staff.

    I’ll give her a small break on this one and be thankful that she at least says the right things, and hope that graduating class listened and took it to heart.

  • ‘News’ needs to be redefined or reinstated. As a word it’s become anemic — bled of value and meaning.

    It’s origin is obvious: it means ‘new’. In that sense it suggests fresh, recent or never happened before. ‘News’ carries the connotation of information of special or critical importance brought from afar. It exists in contradistinction to ‘ordinary’, ‘expected’, ‘every day’, ‘unremarkable’. So ‘news’ should be something unusual, special and of importance.

    A news channel unconstrained by commercial or vested interests would report only those events which were unusual or of special importance. How unusual an event is depends on what the normal state of affairs is in the place where it happens. In a place where ten people get shot every day, someone getting shot is not news. In a place where only one or two people have ever been shot, a shooting is very big news. Conversely, in a place where everyone is very selfish someone doing someone else a good turn is big news. From this, if there are no distorting influences, you can tell what a place is like by the news that comes from there. If the only news is bad news, then that place must be a good place, and vice versa.

    I think it is very interesting to compare British and American news reporting. Misplaced Patriot #5 touched on this point when he said “..unless we find a way to make the news-media not a profit-driven venture.. “. The BBC is exactly that. They run two national television channels, one is more entertainment oriented and the other more information oriented. When I lived in the UK I really appreciated having that choice as well as the quality and depth of the information I got. In addition there were two commercial channels, but even these operated within strict guidelines. Now there are satellite channels, etc. So it is possible for a country to organize a source of untainted, reliable news information for its citizens. Britain was lucky — they got this sorted out when broadcasting was just beginning. It’ll be more difficult for America to rein in and reverse the unfettered corporate bias of its mainstream media.

    Now serious news-seekers are turning to the Internet. It looks like that will eventually replace the MSM as the universal source of fluff-free news.

  • From this, if there are no distorting influences, you can tell what a place is like by the news that comes from there. If the only news is bad news, then that place must be a good place, and vice versa. — Goldilocks.

    Sorry, I have to re-examine that — it doesn’t make sense. What was running in my mind was not the place where the news comes from, but the place where the news is received. Obviously the news coming from Iraq, to take an example at random, is consistently bad. That certainly doesn’t mean that Iraq is a good place to be. The news is bad as received in America, which is still quite a good place to be.

  • Sure, she can cover the more important news, but then people turn the channel, and she might as well not bother when CBS cancels her program because she’s not covering Paris Hilton enough. — Misplaced Patriot, @5

    Absolutely right. My husband watches TV (including news); I don’t. So, he used to tell me snippets of stuff he thought I might find of interest, before we got the paper the next day.

    Then, a little over a year ago, my son steered me to the Carpetbagger Report, I found a couple of other blogs by myself and, whatever news my husband had to report from TV was, suddenly, “old hat”; I’ll’ve heard about it, “on my lefty blogs”, 24-48hrs earlier, and a bit fuller, too. With fact-checking against older versions thrown in for good measure.

    So now, whenever he hears something new (for him) on TV, he asks me “what do your blogs say about it?” And last night, he asked me about Paris Hilton. I tried to explain that that’s not the kind of blogs I read and the “blog-line” on Paris Hilton was mostly how much time had ben devoted to her, vs the “real stuff”. And his answer was along those very same lines Misplaced Patriot mentioned: “I don’t want to hear more about Iraq, or healthcare, or immigration, or taxes. I *want* to hear about Paris Hilton”. And this is not some hick, either; PhD, Phi Betta Kapppa, prof of English (retired) at a University… The whole nine yards of education.

    So yeah, it’s a vicious circle: the population gets dumnbed down in the sugary diet and, in turn, demands more cake.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Now serious news-seekers are turning to the Internet. It looks like that will eventually replace the MSM as the universal source of fluff-free news. — Goldilocks, @7

    Which makes Couric’s “dig” at Internet that much more irritating and out of synch with the rest of her “message” (Surfing the web may be fast and fun, but sometimes pursuing knowledge requires you to go in the deep end — and not just dip your toe in the shallow water.)

  • Libra (9), You might want to take your fine husband to a qualified neurologist and have him tested for Alzheimers. When someone with a certain amount of education “want(s)” to hear about Paris H. there is a problem, or it’s special ed he specialized in.

  • Trying for the third time. Last week Katie Couric spoke and that was also the week The New York Times published their expose on “Save Darfur” (15 million spent and none on aid, aids groups up in arms that “Save Darfur” was calling for military intervention, etc.). Katie Couric’s topic choice indicates she follows celeberties like Loham and Clooney but it doesn’t demonstrate she’s even vaguely aware that the US is still engaged in a war. She’s the E! True Story of the news set.

  • Katie, like all newsreaders, is an improv actress, not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination. She reads what people tell her to read and she does it very smoothly and naturally, never mis-delivering a single solitary syllable despite all the audio and visual chaos surrounding her off-camera during every broadcast.

    Unfortunately, she is also ignorant of the fact that she an ignoramus and a pretentious one at that. If she knew the first thing about the Internet, she would know, for example, that political blogs like Talkingpointsmemo had all the in-depth information about Social Security “reform” that TV news couldn’t and newspapers wouldn’t provide. It is her own medium that is the shallowest within all the shallowness of the MSM.

  • I like the idea of using a “newsreader” as the operative word. That’s what’s true. The other thing is, the real decisions don’t happen at the level of the newsreader, they happen in the booth and in the executive offices. One of the things that CAN happen is that a long-term newreader, like Kronkite, can get a fair amount of power to himself, because he is America’s favorite news uncle. So he was managing editor. He could go to Vietnam and start calling for withdrawal. Katie can’t. She arrived after a powerful managing editor, Rather, was forced to resign in disgrace, and the network designed this touchie-feelie news behind her. But she has next to no power, particularly when her ratings are so abysmal. The truth is, long habit has accustomed us to CBS News being serious news. This is Murrow, Kronkite, the Tiffany network. It’s management that’s trying to make it into Disneyland Central.

    I love Katie, but she’s so far over her head here, I think if I was her, I’d cut and run.

  • Popin-in (@10),

    Nah, nothing wrong with his brain (and I did say he used to teach English, not spec.ed.).

    Paris Hilton is pretty (and TV has pictures) and a pleasure to look at; what man would object to that? “News” about PH are undemanding; not stressful. Given that everything else you hear *is* stressful (I started grinding my teeth in my sleep about a month before we invaded Iraq and have had to sleep with a “mouth guard” ever since), it’s a break for him. He reads celebrity gossip in the paper too. I don’t grudge him that, as long as he knows what needs knowing as well, which he does.

    The real problem, as I see it, is that Paris Hilton’s “drama” , (and all other “dramas”) are presented *as* news, rather than as an installment of a real-life soap opera. OTOH… I bet he’d refuse to watch soap operas; that’s not “manly”

  • “””During the half-hour broadcast, the Paris Hilton “news” got more coverage on CBS than a roadside bomb killing a U.S. soldier, the immigration legislation, and passage of the stem-cell bill combined — times two.”””

    On what are basing this claim ?
    The amount of time a daily news show devoted in one program to covering something that happened that day, as opposed to stories that happened and were covered on previous days ?

    Well why the emphasis ? How is that a suprise or noteworthy ?
    Why not point out that all news shows failed to report on the 6th June D-Day anniversary on the same day, the 8th.
    Or just get a clue.

  • Zeitgeist:

    I honestly don’t know where Katie really stands on the hard news versus fluff issue[…]

    Really? I honestly don’t know how someone could say that in public. Even with a fake name.

  • While I don’t particularly like her impersonation of a newsperson, I wonder how much actual control she has over the format of her show.

  • Kudos to Katie for recognizing the attention paid to the vapid and not to the important. But Katie is just another cog in the Celebrity Industrial Complex after all. She needs to say this not to us, but to her bosses, for it’s not our fault she’s told to say what she’s told to say on her newscasts. But this could also be her Howard Beale moment for a last place anchorwoman of the major network newsies. She could well be on the way out of CBS, especially since she is the Glenn Beck of the major network newscasters right now (as in the lowest rated one.)

    Katie’s swipe at the internet is also more than disingenuous. Sitting in a chair and doing nothing but looking at the tube and watching Katie’s newscast will get you national news that only pays a few seconds notice to the hard news of the day. It’s folks like readers of the Carpetbagger Report who spend a great deal more time reading and responding to the hard news than a viewer of Katie’s who only watches her to see what’s happening on the planet. Sure you can find Paris Hilton on the internet, but one can also find a hell of a lot more about what really matters than what’s on Katie Couric’s show. Nice arrow Katie, but poorly shot.

  • Ms. Deep Thoughts says one thing and does another. But I don’t know if Ms. Deep Thoughts is smart enough to recognize her own hypocrisy.

  • Zeitgeist wrote:

    I honestly don’t know where Katie really stands on the hard news versus fluff issue …

    Comment by Zeitgeist — 6/9/2007 @ 2:30 pm

    Let me help y’all understand.

    Cheerleader Katie said this:

    Surfing the web may be fast and fun, but sometimes pursuing knowledge requires you to go in the deep end …

    Isn’t the ratings-challenged broadcast anchor is suggesting that we folk who look to our broadband hook-up are not, in her not so humble opinion, the shallow ones?

  • Keith Olbermann covered the Paris Hilton story last Friday with an interesting angle about important constitutional issues of Habeas Corpus. I have also seen coverage that highlighted the tensions beyween the LA jail system, which has been operating under a Federal Decree based on overcrowding for decades now, and the judicial system that seeks to impose longer and longer terms backed by taxpayers who don’t want to pony up the cash required to meet that goal. It’s in some ways a naked slice of the lives being lived under the celebrity veneer of LA. It seems some sort of unspoken commentary, think Brandon “Greasy Bear” Davis and their ilk, of the results of too much consolidated wealth and just may pay a hand in the deconstruction of the “Celebrity Industrial Complex.”

    Buzzflash is the first place I stop because there is so much information from such a plethora of sources and links to major full text newspapers. I learn so much from the comment sections of Blogs that I really appreciate sources like this one, that allows unfettered commentary by readers. Reader generated content in its most Democratic form.

  • Katie Couric is a joke as a network prime time news anchor!! Send her back to the morning crowd!

  • Since cutesy Katie is a piece of fluff herself, she knows what she’s talking about!

  • Isn’t it pathetic enough that Katie Couric was the commencement speaker at a college? What, was Pauley Shore too busy? Or Vanna White?

    If I was paying the exorbitant rates of college tutition for my child, and after 4 years the best they could cough up was Katie Couric for the commencement, what she talked about would be the least of my gripe.

  • Someone’s referred to Katie Couric as a fart-fluff. Pretty funny. Her speech was awful – poorly conceived, written, delivered. It was all pap.

    • Comments are closed.