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

[Joseph L. Tioga]

Thanks for passing this along, Michael.  Great to hear someone comment
with authority about what I've witnessed as a sickiningly sweet, familial
banter among local station newscasters.

--Tioga Joe

==================================

> Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 14:09:59 -0400 (EDT)
> From: michael at intrafi.com
> 
> The article below from NYTimes.com 
> has been sent to you by michael at intrafi.com.
> 
> 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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