[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Happy Talk News Covers a War

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Happy Talk News Covers a War

July 18, 2004
 


 

UP to a point, it's fun to howl at Will Ferrell's priceless
portrayal of Ron Burgundy, the fictional local TV news star
at the center of "Anchorman." The movie is set in the
prehistoric era of the 1970's, when such infotainment
inventions as Action News and Eyewitness News were still in
their infancy. With his big ego, big lapels, big ties, big
hair and pea-sized brain, Ron is every newsman who's ever
told us "This is what's happening in your world tonight!"
while remaining clueless about anything happening beyond
his own teleprompter. Ron Burgundy has only one flaming
passion: to end up in the big time of network news. 

You have to laugh - until you realize that he and countless
others like him have made just that leap in the three
decades since. The local news revolution nailed in this
movie - the dictum that the popularity of a news
"personality" with the viewers, not the story, must always
come first - has long since overrun most of both network
and cable news. (The occasional holdout, typified by
"Nightline," must often fight for its life or be subsidized
at PBS.) No sooner do we rejoice at the demise of much of
the 70's cultural detritus lampooned in "Anchorman," from
polyester leisure suits to unembarrassed on-camera sexism,
than we start wondering if TV news may be even more
farcical now than it was then. But these days the farce
isn't so funny. The worst damage committed by Ron Burgundy
at the movie's mythical News Center 4 of San Diego is to
overplay the pregnancy of a panda at the San Diego Zoo. Our
news culture, and not just TV news, muffed the run-up to a
war. 

Watching Mr. Ferrell go on TV to promote "Anchorman" on the
eve of its premiere, you had to notice just how plausibly
his buffoonish, supposedly anachronistic, fictional persona
fits into our "real" news. He turned up in his Burgundy
blazer on the "Today" show the same morning The New York
Post broke its front-page exclusive on John Kerry's choice
of Dick Gephardt as his running mate. "This is an excellent
journalism periodical," said Mr. Ferrell while thumbing
through the offending tabloid before the crowd of "Today"
show groupies in Rockefeller Center. Thus we watched a
fictional anchorman mocking a fictional story from a real
newspaper on a real news program - but was it so clear
which was which? Only a week earlier, "Today" had committed
its own equivalent of The Post's gaffe by failing to
broadcast the live story of Saddam Hussein's court
appearance in Baghdad. It stuck instead with an interview
in which Robert Redford promoted a new movie in which he
does not play Bob Woodward. 

When Mr. Ferrell turned up on "The Daily Show" the next
night, Jon Stewart ribbed him for not basing his
characterization of Ron Burgundy on the fake anchorman Mr.
Stewart himself plays on TV. But such is the vacuum now
often left by the real news that Mr. Stewart's fake anchor
is increasingly drafted to do the job of a real one. One
recent instance occurred after Dick Cheney appeared on CNBC
on June 17. The CNBC interviewer, Gloria Borger, asked the
vice president about his public assertion that a connection
between the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and Saddam Hussein's
government was "pretty well confirmed." Not once but three
times Mr. Cheney said that he "absolutely" had "never said"
any such thing. But Ms. Borger had been right. And it was
left to Mr. Stewart, not her actual TV news colleagues, to
come to her defense by displaying the incontrovertible
proof on "The Daily Show": a clip from "Meet the Press" in
December 2001, in which the vice president flatly told Tim
Russert "it's been pretty well confirmed" that Atta met
with "a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service."


Then again, maybe Mr. Cheney thought he could lie to Ms.
Borger because he mistook CNBC, home to Dennis Miller, for
a fake news outlet. That isn't hard to do. In another stop
on his "Anchorman" promotional tour, Mr. Ferrell crashed
the set of that network's "real" business news program,
"Power Lunch," where he spewed false headlines ("Kenneth
Lay likes to wear makeup as a woman!") and repeatedly
kissed its normally staid female anchor, Sue Herera, on the
lips. Far from disowning this invasion of fiction into its
journalism, CNBC turned the incident into a constantly
replayed promotional clip. The real anchor hardly seemed to
mind, telling Jacques Steinberg of The New York Times that
she enjoyed showing viewers "a different side of me." You
can't get much more Burgundian than that. 

If each generation gets the Hollywood treatment of TV
journalism that it deserves, then "Anchorman," however
hit-and-miss its humor, is our "Network" and "Broadcast
News." "Network" (1976) satirized a network news
operation's willingness to offer any sensationalized
spectacle, even an anchor's televised suicide, to win the
ratings war. "Broadcast News" (1987) showed us how slick
looks and telegenic charm can trump reporting talent and
integrity as assets in the race to the top of TV news
stardom. "Anchorman" grandfathers in the concerns of the
other two but shows how the desperation of would-be news
stars to create likable on-screen personas (to be a
"newsonality," as The Washington Post critic Tom Shales
labeled one pioneer of the breed, Kelly Lange of KNBC in
Los Angeles, in 1977) can mean forsaking journalism
entirely. 

"Anchorman" gets its history right: this toxic element was
first injected into the media bloodstream by innovations in
local news at the dawn of the 70's. One of its earliest
sightings was in New York, where Al Primo, a news director
at WABC, brought Eyewitness News in late 1968. Looked at
today at the Museum of Television and Radio, the early
on-air promos for this then-novel brand of news are
revelatory of what was to come and even funnier than the
parodies of them in "Anchorman." 

In one, the young Geraldo Rivera brings the fellow members
of his news "team" to a Puerto Rican wedding so that his
ethnic "friends," seemingly played by actors, can get to
know his WABC "friends." The next thing you know, one of
the anchors, the grim Roger Grimsby, is shedding his sports
jacket and hitting the dance floor with a sizzling Latina
mama. The commercial's sell line: "The Eyewitness News
Team: The reason people like them so much is that they like
people so much." In 13 months, WABC doubled its ratings at
6 and 11, starting a nationwide stampede by local stations
to ditch their authority-figure anchors for happy-talking
surrogate news "families" of their own. 

The format officially crossed over into network news in
1973, when ABC hired Frank Magid, a consultant who
specialized in these theatrics, to develop the morning
show, "AM America." Built around a surrogate TV family and
outfitted like a suburban home, it begat "Good Morning
America" two years later. The rest is metastasis. "By the
nineties, the tail was wagging the dog," wrote the critic
Steven D. Stark. "Now, local news was setting the
journalistic standard for the networks." 

Some of this influence is merely a matter of style: that
faux familial intimacy is now visible on any TV news show,
national or local, with more than a single anchor. (Even
the once Audio-Animatronic anchors of CNN's "Headline News"
simulate husband-and-wife banter these days.) More
crucially, the premium placed on likability affects the
content of the news. Since 9/11, this has meant wearing and
hawking the flag (as long as it's not draped on a coffin) -
even to the point of dressing the NBC on-screen peacock
icon in the stars and stripes for weeks. It has also meant
not challenging a president as long as he's riding high in
the polls. 

In the now legendary White House press conference of March
6, 2003, not a single reporter, electronic or print, asked
a tough question about anything, including the president's
repeated conflating of 9/11 with the impending war on Iraq
(eight times in that appearance alone). To some critics on
the left, this Stepford Wives performance indicated a press
corps full of conservatives, but I doubt it. This lock-step
spectacle was at least in part an exercise of the Burgundy
principle of pandering: don't do anything that might make
you less popular with your customers. In that same month,
Frank N. Magid Associates, still a major player in the news
consulting business, released a survey telling its clients
that war protests came in dead last of all topics tested
among 6,400 viewers nationwide. In other words, if you're
covering the news based on what's happening as opposed to
what your viewers like, you're taking a commerical risk.
Given that the ownership of local stations, networks and
cable news alike is now concentrated in far fewer hands
than it was in the 1970's, such thinking quickly becomes
orthodoxy in much of the American news business. 

In the new documentary "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on
Journalism," Robert Greenwald unearths some juicy
documentation of Fox News Channel's manipulations on behalf
of its political agenda. But Fox isn't exactly pursuing a
stealth strategy: anyone who can't figure out that it's in
the tank with the Republican party must be brain dead. It's
more insidious when some of its more fair-and-balanced
competitors blow-dry the news not to serve an ideology but
to tell the public what they think the public wants to
hear. That's why the networks have been reluctant to show
casualties in Iraq. That's why we rarely see on American TV
the candid video Michael Moore unveils in "Fahrenheit
9/11," whether of the president or of the grievously
wounded, sometimes embittered soldiers who've returned from
his mission in Iraq. 

Even now, as the entire press, including The Times, copes
with the reality that it wasn't skeptical enough about the
administration's stated case for war, the desire to
gladhand the public can overcome news judgment, especially
on television. Otherwise Americans wouldn't have found it
such a novelty when the Washington correspondent for RTE,
the Irish network, took on Mr. Bush in a TV interview last
month, challenging him repeatedly about the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction and his claim that the war in
Iraq has made us safer. The RTE reporter, Carole Coleman,
wasn't pretending to be any viewer's family or buddy or
lover. "I felt I did my job," she said when American
journalists questioned her about her audacity. Maybe so,
but next to the Ron Burgundys in her profession, she seemed
less like a visitor from a different country than an alien
from a distant planet.   

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/arts/18RICH.html?ex=1091174199&ei=1&en=5431068f4adac27f


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