August 21, 2007
CNN dumbs itself down
One day last week the stock market took a record drop. In a single trading session, the Dow erased all the gains that it had made so far in 2007.
This being a fairly momentous situation, I tuned into CNN Headline News to get the latest rundown of the action on Wall Street.
Headline News, as you probably already know, covers the major news stories in a half-hour format. At the top of the hour, CNN did briefly mention that there was some turmoil on the stock market. But before diving into the Dow in any detail, the news network plunged into more important matters: there had been a new development in the murder-suicide case of wrestler Chris Benoit.
After about five minutes of updates on Benoit, I was sure that CNN would turn its attention to the financial news. Nope. Next came the latest on the Mike Vick dog-fighting scandal.
Then, finally, CNN told me about the stock market. But they saw fit to give me ten minutes of celebrity news first.
In recent years, CNN and the other major news networks have been afflicted with an inability to distinguish between significant news stories and celebrity fluff. On the really bad days, it is difficult for me to distinguish between CNN and The National Enquirer. It was somewhat pathetic to watch the major networks scramble for the chance to interview Paris Hilton after her release from jail. (CNN’s Larry King garnered that honor.) And it was downright painful to watch the excerpts of the Larry King Live interview with Paris that CNN triumphantly aired for weeks. Let’s take a reality check here: Paris Hilton didn’t have anything worthwhile to say before she went to prison. What makes anyone think that a few weeks in the pokey are going to turn her into Henry Kissinger?
Here is a sample from the Larry King interview with Paris:
KING: What was that moment like, we saw you hopping down out. That feeling of freedom?
HILTON: It was one of the happiest days of my life. Like -- it's hard to even describe. It was so exciting even just being in the fresh air and looking up at the sky and the stars and being outside and then it was just pandemonium and then as soon as I saw my mom I just ran to her to give her a hug. So that was really exciting for me.
KING: What do you think it is about you, Paris, that everybody follows you around? You must have examined this in your life. Why do people, photographers, paparazzi, why you?
HILTON: I have no idea. I'm just living my life.
I have no idea either. Some media executives have apparently decided that Paris Hilton’s antics have a huge impact on my life. They sure give me a lot of her: every time she goes shopping, appears in a homemade adult video, switches boyfriends, or gets herself arrested----I have to hear about it, as do you.
A fascination with celebrities is nothing new, of course. Tabloid journalism has been for decades, and it obviously meets the needs of a certain segment of the population. I don’t want to ban The National Enquirer from shelves of my local supermarket. I just want CNN and MSNBC to stop imitating the tabloids.
The major news networks made a dramatic series of lurches toward tabloid journalism in the 1990s. It began in the summer of 1994, when O.J. Simpson was accused of a double murder.
This story had a somewhat legitimate claim to newsworthiness: O.J. was a well known public figure and he had been accused of homicide. But the media went completely overboard, assuming that the average American cared as much about the subsequent O.J. trial as he did about Watergate or the Persian Gulf War. Throughout 1994 and 1995, the O.J. trial and its sorry cast of characters were everywhere, all the time. It was impossible to escape them.
Celebrities weren’t the only tabloid material that the major networks glommed onto during the 1990s. In 1996, a young girl named Jon Benet Ramsey was found murdered in an affluent community in Boulder, Colorado. This was certainly a tragic case, and legitimate local news for the people of Boulder. But CNN and the other networks hyped the Jon Benet murder into a national news story. Before long, the young victim's image was everywhere.
The Jon Benet media frenzy was followed by a series of sordidly over-hyped cases that involved young, white, affluent female victims: Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Lacy Peterson, and Natalie Holloway. (Ms. Smart was fortunately rescued alive from her abductors.)
Don’t get me wrong: all of these cases were tragic in their own way, and newsworthy in the local areas where they occurred. But were these news stories of national (indeed international) significance? While reporters and journalists were swarming over these young, white, female victims, how many African-American children were killed in their homes? How many balding middle-aged men went missing in America? How many elderly women with wrinkles and liver spots were murdered? And why did their cases not become national news stories?
The answer, of course, is that CNN (and the other major networks) are increasingly opting for sensationalism over real news and analysis. They have identified two types of stories that can be easily hyped: the celebrity scandal and the pretty female murder/abduction victim. Each of these stories has its place---but not the top of the headlines, and certainly not for weeks and months at a stretch.
So please, CNN, reexamine your priorities and your focus. Give us more of the real news that we used to rely on you for. And leave yellow journalism to the supermarket tabloids.