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Just Another Essay



All the News that Isn’t the News

Essay Posted January 16, 2007 by James E. Nelson

Morningside College, a local private liberal arts school, is presenting a symposium on The Daily Show next week. For those not familiar with the show, it is Comedy Central’s parody of a news program hosted by comedian Jon Stewart. The Daily Show is wildly popular and college kids prefer to get their news from Stewart than from the major networks, news channels, or newspapers. Growing out of that popularity, one of the show’s “reporters,” Stephen Colbert now has a show of his own, The Colbert Report, a spoof of The O’Reilly Factor, which has, in turn, become nearly as popular as Stewart’s show. News makers try as hard to get on The Daily Show as they do the Sunday morning news shows.

The question for the Morningside symposium is, “Why is it that college kids prefer to get their news from Comedy Central over real news sources?” I don’t know how the Morningside professors are going to answer that question, but it has me thinking about it, because like the college kids, I don’t watch the news anymore unless I have to. The news isn’t news, after all. It has become a parody of the news. You can’t really tell the difference between Stephen Colbert and Bill O’Reilly. They both blow everything out of proportion. They both are remarkably smart and are able to turn whatever their guests say into something that sounds stupid. Everybody laughs at both of them and their overwrought sense of importance. The only real difference is that Bill O’Reilly actually takes himself seriously.

But a more important question than, “Why is it that college kids prefer to get their news from Comedy Central over real news sources?” is “What is news anyway?” Actually the question needs to be put into a completely different context, the context of American public discourse. “What is a well-informed electorate?” or “What is the proper content of public discourse?” In terms of our civic life together, the news should be aimed at making us a better informed electorate and informing us on issues of public significance. This new question leads me to a couple of new paths of inquiry.

The first inquiry concerns the changing role of the reporter. There are still some first class reporters out there, but in order to distinguish between the real reporters and most people that get paid as reporters, the real reporters are now called “investigative reporters.” (And this applies primarily to the United States. Foreign correspondents fall into a different category.) In this day and age, the vast majority of the news is not gleaned by the work of reporting. Instead, agencies and institutions that want to be on the news issue press reports or hold press conferences. In this venue the news maker (rather than the reporter or news agency) is able to control the content of the story, and news is reduced to propaganda.

The area that I’m most conversant with is economic reporting. A few years ago, the federal government stopped reporting how much new money they printed every month, called the money supply, or M3. In the monthly reports we now only get M1 and M2 from the official government reports. Economists can still figure out M3 but the numbers are no longer readily available. As a result there is no major financial news outlet (including the Wall Street Journal and Barons) that reports M3. It is no accident that the Federal government decided to quit reporting M3, because our money supply is now growing at an average of 10% faster than our economy. In other words, 10% of the money that the government prints every year is essentially counterfeit and reduces the value of the money we have in our pocket. Assuming your dollar was worth a dollar in 1999, it was only worth 91¢ in 2000, 82.6¢ in 2001, 75.1¢ in 2002, etc. Of course the reality isn’t quite that simple because the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, etc, are also increasing their money supply (their own M3) at varying rates beyond actual economic growth, so it is actually much more difficult (if not impossible) to figure out the actual value of the American dollar in relation to other currencies. (This guess work as to the actual value of currencies is the job of the currency traders.) The decline is not nearly as phenomenal when compared to the value of the Euro or the Yen. But consider that gold was selling for $257 per oz in mid-1999 (the beginning of our example above) and it is now selling for $625 per oz, a nearly 250% increase, or a 250% decrease in the value of the American dollar.

This ought to be a significant ongoing story in the economic field. It’s a story that real reporters would probably cover. But it is not covered by the press releases that are issued by the Federal Reserve, the Office of Management and Budget, and the White House. So it gets ignored because reporting has been largely reduced to repeating the press releases; that is, the propaganda.

Or consider the blurring of the line between hard news and society gossip. (This is my second line of inquiry.) I could set up a straw man and observe that stories about what Mel Gibson says to the police when he’s drunk or what Michael Richards (Kramer from Seinfeld) says to a heckler when he’s rattled aren’t news. It’s gossip. Of course gossip is typically far more interesting than the news, so we pay attention when such stories air, and they thus become a staple of the evening news.

But to get to the heart of the matter, one needs to take a critical look at the so called hard news, not just the society news. Consider the footage of a burning warehouse in New Jersey that plays throughout the day on MSNBC, CNN, and FOX, and then gets extensive coverage on the evening news. Or remember the day several years ago when regular programming on every network was interrupted so we could watch O.J. Simpson meander through Los Angeles in his white Bronco. What do either of these stories have to do with a well-informed electorate? It doesn’t. How does either story impact the content of public discourse? It reduces public discourse to ultimately trivial matters.

And beyond triviality, the news has become voyeuristic. We don’t watch the six o’clock news for information as much as we do to experience vicariously the triumphs and tragedies of other people. As a result, the news is not so much fodder for public discourse as it is for talk around the water cooler.

Even the coverage of wars (going all the way back to Viet Nam) has been transformed from hard news into voyeuristic images. And as the news morphed into voyeurism, the television prime time entertainment programming has had to change into something that could compete with the news. Consider the difference between the original Dragnet and the various CSI and Law and Order clones that make up the heart of detective dramas. The focus is less and less on police work and more and more on gory or sexually explicit images that we can watch and participate in (through our imagination). And, of course, there is the rise of reality TV, which is voyeuristic entertainment in its purest form.

The news, the cop show, and reality TV all deal in the same sort of entertainment. The only truly amazing thing is that modern reporters repeating propaganda and news readers offering an endless stream of voyeuristic entertainment take themselves seriously.

The real difference, it seems to me, between adults who watch the real news and college kids that prefer The Daily Show and The Colbert Report is that the college kids are willing to admit the emperor has no clothes. They recognize that the six o’clock news is, in truth, a parody of real news, and that there is no substantive difference between Brian Williams (or Charles Gibson, or Katie Couric) and Jon Stewart, except that Brian Williams, et. al. takes themselves seriously (and thus make a donkey of themselves) while Jon Stewart only pretends to take himself seriously. (“I’m not a real donkey, I only play one on television.” to paraphrase an old television commercial.) In that context, Stewart and Colbert are the more legitimate television personalities because they fully understand what they are doing and embrace it. Williams, Gibson, and Couric imagine themselves to be moderators of legitimate public discourse and are thus self-deluded.

At this point I’m tempted to launch into Jacque Derrida and deconstructionism. I’m tempted to explore the clearly deconstructionist character of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and consider Stewart as the contemporary poster boy of post-modernism. But I suppose this essay is long enough, so I will leave those thoughts implicit in this essay and simply say, “Good night, and good luck.”