Remember The News?
You know, the news, that 6-and-10pm staple folks watched every night, selecting their favorite newscast by their favorite anchorman, secure that the actual news was news no matter what network they turned on?
If you answered yes, you’re probably over 30, remember the satisfying “clunk” of a television dial and can tell Rather from Brokaw with ease.
Under 30? Could be you’ve never watched an evening newscast at all. And the words “[reporter name here] filed this report” are as foreign to you as “don’t trip on the phone cord,” since the news medium has all but abandoned the written, recorded and edited story that was once its meat and potatoes in favor of live reports and expert commentary.
Call it the new state of news — born of 24-hour cable news channels, the Internet, the age of insta-communication.
Current events programming is now an around-the-clock enterprise that has leapt from the TV screen to the web and into the social-media milieu. And — tempted by networks, programs, show formats and personalities that cater to every ideology — people are tuning in like never before.
In the past year alone, according to Nielsen Media Research data, FOX News Channel* has attracted 28 percent more prime-time viewers, while MSNBC reports a spike of 31 percent. And though its rivals trumpet the venerable CNN’s recent audience fall-off, they neglect to note that those stats are skewed by the astronomical ratings the network garnered for the three presidential primary debates it hosted in February ’08.
“Choice is a great thing,” says John King, CNN chief national correspondent and host of the network’s new Sunday morning news show, State of the Union. “And choice in our programming is the technological manifestation of free speech. That’s why we’re here.”
THE BEGINNING OF THE CONVERSATION
Choice is also nudging the “talking head and teleprompter” model ever closer to extinction, ushering in a new, interactive, Internet-driven model — and daring journalists to keep pace.
It’s a challenge that four-term Florida Congressman turned political pundit Joe Scarborough and his Morning Joe cohost, veteran network news anchor Mika Brzezinski, believe creates more informed newscasters — and a more involved public. “Because we’re not chained to teleprompters, Mika and I come to the table every morning ready to move in whatever direction the stories are,” Scarborough explains. “That’s the future.”
“The old model was more like a speech,” opines CNN Newsroom anchor Rick Sanchez. “The new model is more like a conversation. You have a million people who are at home with a laptop on their lap, or at their computer, or on their Blackberry. They can go to YouTube and watch any video they want. They can go [online] and get their news. They control the flow of news they are receiving.
“So here we are saying, ‘Watch us! Come to us and get your news!’ And they’re saying, ‘I have a smorgasbord of news here and you’re asking me to just come to you?’ I think that’s very important, and I’m in the process of adapting to it.”
THE ONE ON THE LEFT IS ON THE RIGHT …
The new model also invites an intriguing quagmire: Conversations held in real time allow hosts’ worldview to seep through, leading to the now widely accepted, if not entirely accurate, perception of a leftie net (MSNBC), a rightie net (FOX News) and middle men and women (CNN).
What’s more, prime-time ratings demonstrate that the uber-opinionated evening shows enjoy enormous audience loyalty, bolstering the ticklish notion that increasing numbers of viewers demand their current events analysis synced up with their own beliefs. FOX News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor is the only show to consistently crack Nielsen’s cable top 40. And in the past year alone, MSNBC has seen precipitous jumps in viewership for prime-time stars Keith Olbermann (up 32 percent from February ’08) and newcomer Rachel Maddow (up a whopping 115 percent).
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
“I do think it is dangerous that you can watch quote/unquote ‘news’ through the prism of your politics and never leave the prism of your politics,” allows CNN’s King, who confounds online bloggers trying to definitively pin him to the left or right. “No matter how strongly you believe in your own political beliefs, you are a better person, and a better advocate for your beliefs, if you study the other side.”
Their complex political pedigrees alone make Scarborough and Brzezinsi prime targets for naysayers of every political stripe, even as their Morning Joe following has grown 74 percent.
“Republicans especially don’t understand how a conservative can be as critical of the Republican party as I’ve been,” sighs Scarborough. Adds Brzezinski, “My father [former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski] worked in the Carter administration. My brother is a Republican who worked for McCain. I’ve been accused of everything because of that. But our show has developed such a voice that I hear less of that now. Whether I lean to the left and Joe leans to the right, you will not see us doing that on every issue.”
Nor will you catch them pining for any “good old days.”
“Actually, I think we’ve evolved to a better place,” Brzezinski asserts, “because back when nobody was supposed to talk about their affiliation, and no one was supposed to share their opinion, there was a lot of liberal thinking and a lot of liberal narrow-mindedness — and the questions would come from that standpoint, but hide behind the veil of ‘journalism.’ Now at least we get to come from an honest standpoint of who we are and what our worldview is and what our life experience is.”
HOW INFO-TAINING!
Asked about the tendency of some programs to confuse celebrity with newsworthiness, and the nigh rock star status of political satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the anchors are circumspect.
“I don’t want to be viewed as an entertainer,” says King, a former AP Wire writer who proudly uses the front pages of national newspapers as the backdrop for his show. “I want to be viewed as somebody who is a source of information for people, so I am a little bit more of a dinosaur in that I say, ‘Why would I do this? What is the news value?'”
“Before we started our show, we were told by a lot of media observers that the news haul for an hourlong show was shrinking more and more,” says Scarborough. “So you were getting more stories about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears; now it would be OctoMom. Mika symbolically shredding a ‘news’ story on Paris Hilton early on really sent a message to the 4 million or so people who saw it on YouTube. And that was that we were going to, in the words of Bill Buckley, ‘stand athwart history yelling stop!’ It’s a radical diversion from the direction we were going not only on cable news, but also on broadcast news.”
Still, King believes, the entertainment-based talk and news satire shows have a place in the current events lexicon.
“If there’s a kid out there that thinks watching Jon Stewart is watching the news, well that’s troubling,” he reasons. “But if he says, ‘I am going to go on cnn.com once or twice a day and I’m going to watch some CNN programming; maybe I can go somewhere else and watch some news programming. I read a paper, I read a magazine AND I watch Jon Stewart’ — then that’s great.
“Life is a mosaic, so why shouldn’t news-gathering be a mosaic?”
BIG TWITTER IS WATCHING YOU …
Though the teleprompter is old news, that doesn’t mean today’s hosts work technology-free. Where autocue monitors once fed them stories and updates, Blackberrys and laptop screens now tackle the job, even in the eye of the camera.
And for Sanchez, it’s become his signature.
Like many adults, the baby-boomer dad had dismissed Twitter — an online utility that allows people to share short bursts of information in real-time — as a toy for his teenage sons, with little relevance to the mature population, until a conversation with his boss convinced him otherwise. “I got the laptop out and put it on the set where I do the news,” marvels Sanchez, “In the middle of the newscast, a viewer got on Twitter and started talking to me. Then I had another 20 and another 20 and before you know it, I had 400 and then 500!”
His ability to trade information with victims of 2008’s Hurricane Gustav whose PDAs were their only source of communication sealed Sanchez’s reputation as the Twittering News Guy — and his belief that the Twitter community is not only relevant, but vital.
“Now I go [online] and say, ‘Hey! What are you guys talking about?’ — literally participating in their world. And when I say, ‘Sorry, guys, I have to go and do my show’ they’ll go, ‘Can we come with?’
“Voilà! Old media meets new media and there’s a marriage going on!”
King, however, remains committed to the most immediate form of newsgathering there is: “I travel every week,” he says. “It puts me in the face of pain, covering a recession and people losing their jobs and losing their homes and losing their health care, but it informs me so much. And it helps me translate the debates in Washington into the language of the people.
“Maybe it’s a little old-fashioned, but you cannot replace eyeball to eyeball. But you can supplement it with e-mail and Twitter, absolutely.”
COMING SOON TO … EVERYTHING … NEAR YOU
All agree that the multiplatform model is here to stay, and that budding and veteran journalists alike need to master all tools of their evolving trade.
“There will be no more cookie-cutter anchors who read teleprompters,” predicts Brzezinski. “Those will be exposed. Now you will be on the air. And you will be on Twitter. And you will be on a foot camera. And you will be on the Internet. And you will be on all the time because times are tough and they’re cutting costs.
“If you don’t have something to bring to the table that shows you should be there and you know your material, you won’t be there.”
Stay tuned.
*Editor’s note: FOX News Channel was invited to participate in this story and declined
