Talking loud and saying nothing

For those of you who know me personally, you’re well aware of my disdain for television news. I read a few things over the weekend to only intensify my loathing, this time regarding coverage of the war.

Much has been written about Fox News and its shameless conservative tilt (some have even taken to calling it Faux News, a title that is well deserved). Jonathan Storm, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, was watching the network’s coverage of the war over the weekend and wasn’t impressed. I’m not surprised.

“[J]ust when you were starting to think, ‘Hey, these guys know what they’re doing,’ up popped Oliver North, one of the cable channel’s embedded ‘journalists,'” Storm said. “North said every single soldier he met had told him Fox News was ‘all they watch out here because it’s fair and balanced and portrays them as what they are, American heroes.’ Come on, Ollie, you’re supposed to be doing news, not a jingoistic call-in radio show. Real news networks show antiwar protests, give airtime to foreign political representatives, and don’t flinch from the pain of relatives of the casualties of war.”

First of all, Ollie North has no business pretending to be a reporter. He’s a failed Republican Senate candidate who lied to Congress and helped orchestrate a massive international crime that involved selling arms to a sworn enemy. Second of all, real television networks don’t feel the need to show partisan hacks touting the network — on air, during a war. “We report, you decide”? Please.

The other thing that caught my eye was Mitch Albom’s column in the Detroit Free Press yesterday about war coverage in general (via Atrios). While Storm was disappointed with Fox, Albom was equally unmoved by CNN, but for entirely different reasons.

Albom relayed one instance when CNN showed footage of a reporter with troops hearing an explosion in the distance, leading to amazement from anchors in studio. CNN “neglected to mention that the report was old, more than a day old, and that rerunning it was nothing short of gratuitous, to show folks how impressive — and brave! — CNN was.”

Worse, Albom saw one CNN anchor proclaim that the network’s footage has been “the star and the story of this war.” At this point, Albom couldn’t take it anymore.

“Oh, really? I thought the stars and the story of this war were the soldiers. And the intelligence folks who found Saddam Hussein’s bunker. And the bravery of the families waiting at home. Reporters are not stars. And photographs are not the story. But then, to hear some of these networks tell it — and CNN is not alone here — you actually would think that nothing like this had happened before.”

He’s right. It’s why I’ll take newspapers and the ‘net over TV any day.