COMMENTARY
Amid TV's breathless coverage, newspapers bring context and subtlety
Jerry
Seinfeld has a big problem with cable TV news. On the David Letterman show recently,
he launched into a hilarious rant about the clutter and confusion on the screen
when he turns on CNN, or MSNBC, or Fox.
His particular
gripe is "the strip": that never-ending flow of words across the
bottom of the screen. Because the strip's subject matter is different from
what's on the main part of the screen, a baffling disconnect arises in the
viewer's brain.
Seinfeld's
complaint: "Don't these idiots who run the networks know? We don't want to
read! That's why we're watching TV!"
Funny as it is,
Seinfeld's take on cable news raises some legitimate questions.
How much
information can any viewer take in at once? And just how deeply deficient and
horribly atrophied is the American attention span these days if these
gimmicks are necessary?
Certainly the
cable news networks and how they do business have changed American media in a
huge way.
When the phone
rings these days, and someone says, "Turn on the TV" - this has
become the moment that strikes fear in our hearts.
In a crisis, the
public flocks to CNN and its competitors, glued to their all-out coverage. We
stare at the screen for hours, whether or not there's new information. It's a
form of group therapy, perhaps, when we're overwhelmed by events beyond our
control.
For a monumental
event such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or the recent shuttle disaster,
cable news is compelling and irreplaceable.
But for subtler
and more complicated stories, I'll take a newspaper any day.
Here's how
newspapers are - in my admittedly biased opinion - superior to TV news:
1. Newspaper
reporters don't interview each other; they interview news sources. Is anything
more annoying than watching TV journalists fill time by asking each other
questions and getting empty responses?
2. Cable news is
fleeting; it's "in one ear and out the other." By contrast, a
newspaper story can be studied, reread, clipped out and actually understood. It
can be hung on a refrigerator, read aloud at the dinner table and sent to your
brother in the mail - or by e-mail. It tends to create discussion, rather than
a desire for more Fritos.
3. The visual
impact is, in its own way, just as good - maybe better. Granted, the TV footage
of the disintegration of the World Trade Center towers brought some of the most
potent visual images of our time. But think, too, of the impact of a great
still photograph that captures human emotion and that can sink in and be
remembered, not just flit past and be forgotten. Or think of the strength of an
informative map or graphic that helps increase knowledge and understanding.
4. Most
importantly, newspaper stories are capable of communicating nuances and
subtleties. What they lack in immediacy, they make up in information and
complexity.
On this subject,
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman last week offered his own criticism of
cable TV news networks. He identifies a hawkish bias on their part, one that
belies the usual criticism of the media as wildly liberal.
"For
months, both major U.S. cable news networks have acted as if the decision to
invade Iraq has already been made, and have in effect seen it as their job to
prepare the American public for the coming war.
"In an
environment in which anyone who questions the administration's foreign policy
is accused of being unpatriotic," Krugman notes, these media outlets have
"taken it as their assignment to sell the war, not to present a mix of
information that might call the justification for war into question."
It's the aim of
this newspaper, and most of the nation's large newspapers, to present a good
mixture of information and to let readers draw their own conclusions. It's
certainly not our mission to "sell the war" or to campaign against
it.
So, for clarity,
nuanced information and balance, newspapers have a lot to offer. But we'll
leave the last word on cable news, a devastatingly accurate one, to Seinfeld:
"At the end
of half an hour, I think I know less than I knew before."
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