Why Dan Rather is like Tide Soap
Sat May 15th, 2004 13:02 MSTI originally posted this as a comment on Professor Jay Rosen’s PRESSthink blog in response to this article.
That the intelligencia of television news–plus Gerald Rivera need be reminded that news is a business is pathetic. This state of affairs can only be due to their long ago arrogation of self-importance and “independence. This was greatly inflated by the vast power first shown in the Vietnam War reporting and Watergate. They don’t like to consider themselves mere employees. Some, in fact, are not – they are assets in the sense of being marketing brands.
A truth that many “media personalities” need to understand is the implication of branding. The same applies to others such as Hollywood stars. The popularity of an anchor comes from the development of that person’s on-air persona (or print equivalence) as a brand. Becoming a brand is a combination of mostly luck and a little skill, and often a willingness and ability in the field of back-stabbing. The mention of CNN’s almost hiring of a high-school dropout as an anchor should make this obvious.
Do we really believe there are only a few people in this country of 300,000,000 with the ability to be a Dan Rather? I’m sure Dan Rather thinks he is special, but I see Dan Rather as no different from Tide laundry soap: he is a brand, and as such, doesn’t have any special insight into the world or greater logical abilities or intelligence than the rest of us. I am not interested in being lectured on how I should think by a Tide soap box. Likewise, I really resent it when a Feminine Hygiene Brand like Ted Koppel does it.
I know that Sam Donaldson long ago became convinced of his superiority over not only mere mortals, but also over his fellow journalists. Too many journalists who have become brands are as misguided as the many Hollywood stars who imagine their popularity and enormous salaries confer upon them expertise in environmentalism or war or oppression or some other issue.
The rise of blogging shows that there are many people who are not only capable of investigative reporting but active in doing so, and many, many more who are skilled editorialists. Not that most blogs rise to this level, but enough do to show that for no pay at all, and no journalism training, they are as good or better than the brand-name editorialists and talking heads, and often reporters.
For example, why did professional journalists not discover that Kerry was attempting to hide the fact that he was in the Navy during all of his anti-war activities - an attempt which started with an odd date gap in his official biography and was followed with the removal of those dates entirely when his actual records were published? Why did that take the blogosphere?
I don’t expect blogging (or its successors) to make a big impact in the evening network news audience for quite a while, although the impact of technology like the internet is hard to predict (who expected that the highest paid medical specialty, radiology, would be outsourced to India?).
I long ago stopped watching the evening news, because it had stopped being “hard news” and instead was somewhere between “news analysis” and “editorial” - if there is a “between” there. I occasionally peek in at the evening news and in the faint hope that it is changed. But usually I find a Tide Box telling me what to think or yet once more reporting on an issue that is utterly trivial to any but those obsessed with those causes universally favored by the mainstream news media.
The daily news agenda is determined by the censors who determine which of the myriad of possible stories to investigate, and which of those to show, and with what emphasis and “angle.” The term “censor” is of course not preferred because of its pejorative association, but it describes one of the main functions of an editor or producer.
The pressure of a half hour show means there must be a censor. The uniformity between the shows is, I believe, not only due to the business strategy of evenly splitting the market (the safe choice) but also the group-think of the censors and the media “intelligencia” in general – the same stories are “obviously” important.
Rupert Murdoch saw an unfilled market niche when he founded Fox News. Anybody who knows Murdoch or who knows people who have worked closely with him (as I do) understands that he is first and foremost a capitalist, with his political views far less important. After all, what conservative would arrange for his network to not cover the amazingly large Hong Kong freedom demonstrations (I am making an assumption here, of course, that Murdoch did indeed make that choice because of his business interests in China).
But Murdoch recognized that there are at least two ways to take market share - copy a successful business (CNN) or create a differentiated business: a network with a conservative slant, genuinely intelligent anchors who sometimes do real field reporting - not the Ted Koppel highly scripted perfect costume and setting performance; unabashed and genuinely felt patriotism; a dash of T&A; and, creative original programming like Oliver North’s “War Stories.”
The First Amendment anticipated a diversity of viewpoints in the news. Nobody expected a single ”objective” viewpoint, because such objectivity is not within human nature. The news media take’s Heinlein’s “Fair Witness” fiction and believe it applies to them.
Fox News is an example of the United States finally acquiring diversity in the news. It should be embarrassing that it took a former Australian to do this.
Not that Fox won’t fixate on the human interest story of the day - especially trials, where most of their anchors including Geraldo have training and experience - they haven’t just covered trials, they have been “been there and done that”. But when breaking news occurs, there is usually already on air an anchor who is capable of thinking his/her way out of a broken teleprompter; an anchor who is at least of reasonable intelligence and has probably worked outside of journalism in the past.
I find it amusing that Geraldo is singled out by Dr. Rosen as not being a member of the “intelligencia of television news.” That is especially ironic given the nature of the speech under discussion, because I would be surprised if any professionals doubt that Geraldo understands the position of money in the business. He gave up a lot of it to join Fox.
Geraldo is an unusual individual. He is not an unintelligent person - few unintelligent people get degrees in law. Geraldo is a paradigm breaker. His approach to journalism, and today he is operating as a journalist, is unique and (at least to me) well worth watching.
Of course, like anyone else, I cringe a bit at some harmless exaggerations (in Afghanistan, the famous “died at this very spot” gaffe), but Geraldo deserves a lot more respect than he gets. Just like the rest of “mainstream media,” Geraldo has a cause that he favors. But unlike them, he doesn’t pretend to be objective. When you watch Geraldo, you know his attitudes and his personal feelings. Furthermore, unlike them, his cause is a non-cynical patriotism, a love of the troops he embeds with, and a genuine, un-nuanced view of the evil we deal.
Furthermore, he feels no pressure to adopt a staid, boring but “gravitas” bearing “professional journalist” guise when on camera. Instead, for once, we have a human being - a rather manic one - who gets excited, gets scared (well, I’m not so sure about that), gets angry, gets proud and is very empathetic.
When I watch Geraldo in a war zone, I call it “Geraldo’s Magnificent Adventure” because this man is informing me in a way nobody else does, and frankly, I’m envious of him.
As I say, he is a mold breaker. Whether that will prove a successful business approach is, of course, important. But at least Fox is willing to try the experiment.
If I could pick the newsmen I want to investigate and report on the world, Geraldo would be far above many of the major network personnel. There are some others at Fox (not including O’Reilly) whom I would also choose, because Fox, unlike the mainstream networks, uses people with real world demonstrated as its talking heads, and along with traditional journalists, uses soldiers as its war correspondents (Oliver North, Greg Kelly).
I have hyped Fox here before, because I think they bring a major lesson that journalists need to hear: you pride yourselves in racial diversity in your newsrooms, but you have no diversity in your viewpoint. Fox is clobbering its competitors for exactly that reason. And Fox is owned by a hard headed media tycoon, who wants money, not adulation.
Consider the state of a culture that considers Rather, Brokaw and Jennings house intellectuals.
Even worse, the colostomy bag charm of Andy Rooney is taken seriously by “the media”. And so is Cronkite, who like Rooney, stumbled around in WWII as a correspondent and profited from the fact of it ever since. All five of them are intellectual flyweights. One sentence composed by Quentin Reynolds carried more weight and perception than all the accumulated crap from these guys.
All five are subsidiary phenomena of the star-system, the ages old thing that attributes quality to celebrity. I have hope, because I can’t imagine a world where the “Thoughts of Dan Rather” will sit side by side with even the weakest musings by, say, Alistair Cooke on a bookshelf. Or the opportunistic tomes by Brokaw about The Greatest Generation. Hey Tom! How about taking on a subject that would involved controversy and insight! Praising the praiseworthy isn’t very demanding.
Rather is just plain nuts. He slipped off his perch years ago when he thought Nixon was trying to have him killed. Brokaw climbed onto his perch when he won a battle at “Today” and didn’t have to do commercials (which he described as “revolting”. Hey Tom! Who the hell do you think you are, anyway). And Jennings? Have you ever see this guy below the neck? Russert is fast going the same way. He got his bloomers in a bunch when the Colin Powell interview from Amman was interrupted. Russert is forgetting that without tele-exposure, he’d still be doing the “AFTER” images in Don’t Marry Your Cousin advisories.
Rhod’s allusion to Alistair Cooke’s genius left me wringing my hands’ wistfully, and thinking: “Dear God, how dark our world becomes when such giants are lost to it!”
Cooke, as most of you perhaps know, was the internationally-acclaimed voice of “Masterpiece Theatre,” and one of America’s very best friends (can we say the same of Brokaw, Rather, or Jennings? Can we say the same of Kerry, Clinton, or Teddy “Bear” Kennedy?)
His death on March 30 came as a shock to the international community despite the fact that he was 95, and ailing at the time. Eulogized U.S. ambassador William Farish, in London: “[Cooke]…had a first-class mind, and most flatteringly–a sincere and abiding interest in all things American….”
In 1932 Cooke came to the U.S. to study at Yale University, and he journeyed across the country by car. “The trip was an absolute eye-opener for me,” he recalled. “Even then, even in the Depression, there was a tremendous energy and vitality to America. The landscape and the people were far more gripping and dramatic than anything I had ever seen….”
–As tragic as Cooke’s death was, it was equally tragic that he left this world without ever having told us how he felt about DEMOCRATS!
Dan Rather and Tide
Useful Fools: Why Dan Rather is like Tide Soap John Moore writes a lengthy piece on how Dan Rather is like Tide Soap (hint: it’s all about the branding). Here are some tidbits: A truth that many “media personalities” need…
Robert:
Cooke was too much a gentleman to state the obvious about low-life, and in his wisdom would have dismissed the long-term effect of a cultural abberation like the Democratic Party today. At every point in his professional life, he looked above the swarm and pressed hard on the subject of freedom and free societies. I loved him, even though he’s dismissed as a polemicist by The Left, a word they use pejoratively to scorn people they dislike. To them a great intellect is expressed in the fatuous crap produced by Maureen Dowd. This is worse than stupidity; it approaches an emotional disorder.
I don’t despair over the popularity of the three dolts on “major network” news, because somehow the cream always floats to the top. The history of our culture won’t be written by The Left, in the same sense that a bacteria doesn’t write a medical dictionary. Its contribution is merely part of a diagnosis.
I have noticed this, however. The info-fetish of the media and its furious demand for interviews, press conferences, press statements, leaks and the like is not a demand for information alone. It’s a demand for information-we-can-use. Consider is to be a version of the monkeys-with-typewriters example of probability. Monkeys with enough time and enough energy could produce all the works of Shakespeare. Lefty journalists with enough information can alter, edit and distort that information to produce the desired report and still have attributions. False attributions, but attributions nevertheless.
An observer of Cooke’s stature could deduce the essence of an event almost automatically. So could a dozen other truly great commentators, like Malcolm Muggeridge. Give them an event and they produced the information. The opposite principle applies today. Give Dan Rather enough information and he will produce an event.
Carnival of the Vanities 88
Welcome to Spot On and this week’s Carnival of the Vanities. I am your host, Karol. You can read all about me here. I usually write about politics but indie rock and the Sopranos, among other things, make appearances. Please…
1. Editor does not equal censor.
2. Investigative reporting and opinion writing have never been highly specialized skills that must be entrusted to a media elite. No one ought to be surprised that out of several million bloggers, a few manage to break stories that haven’t appeared yet in the mainstream press. It ain’t that hard. Every working journalist has dozens of possible stories in the oven. Nobody has time to get them all done.
Successful journalists got there by:
a. Showing up every day.
b. Working, at least early in their careers, long hours for low pay.
c. Writing with speed and facility.
d. Asking a lot of questions.
e. Not burning out.
You can do it, too! The trick is finding somebody who is willing to pay you for it.
1. Editor does not equal censor.
True. But editors do censor, among other things. MSM editors censor in the dictionary sense when the alter or ignore stories that don’t fit either their political agenda (if they have one) or their political world view.
In other words, when there are lots of things going on, the decision to focus very highly on a relatively minor incident (Abu Ghraib) vs a couple of major incidnets (Berg Beheading or the two chemical weapons finds last week, one of which, in the right hands, could have produced a gallon of Sarin, enough to kill tens of thousands of people if used right), is essentially censorship - more like true peopaganda than crude censorship. Just take the last case - the one gallon Sarin shell (which produced only traces because it wasn’t used right). If Al Qaeda has some of those (and there is every reason to think that they do), they can remove the two inert incredients from the shell, put them in bottles or whatever, smuggle them into the US, mix the contents together in a spray device and kill hundreds to tens of thousands of Americans in a major city - very soon.
2. Investigative reporting and opinion writing have never been highly specialized skills that must be entrusted to a media elite. No one ought to be surprised that out of several million bloggers, a few manage to break stories that haven’t appeared yet in the mainstream press. It ain’t that hard. Every working journalist has dozens of possible stories in the oven. Nobody has time to get them all done.
It is good to hear that from a professional journalist, because the MSM tries to give the opposite impression. Furthermore, the MSM tries to keep the disseminatin of the results under their control.
Successful journalists got there by:
a. Showing up every day.
b. Working, at least early in their careers, long hours for low pay.
c. Writing with speed and facility.
d. Asking a lot of questions.
e. Not burning out.
I suspect this is true in most working journalism worlds. But in the fevered world of DC and NYC, in the NYT and the alphabet networks, the world is a lot different. Stardom is a possiblity. Lots of money is possible. One is judged by one’s peers at least partly on how one produces news that matches the world view of the judges.
Of course this doesn’t mean one doesn’t have to do the steps you show. I would say, however, that what good journalists should do is to first know quite a bit about the world outside of journalism. The questions asked by the White House press corp in the Bush-was-AWOL debacle were pathetic. I watched the news conferences. Either those people had no clue about how the Guard and Reserves operated, or they for some bizarre reason acted that way.
And then we have the issue that Kerry recently tried to cover-up a cover-up of his military status (see this blog a ways down). If Bush had tried that, do you woubt there would have been huge outcries, congressional committees, etc? But the Kerrry story, which I found from public sources (all on his web site), has not run anywhere as far as I can tell without having access to Nexus.
You can do it, too! The trick is finding somebody who is willing to pay you for it.
But why would I wan’t to? I get payed pretty well now.
1. Editor does not equal censor.
One function of somebody in the organization is essentially censorship, especially a major organization that tries to stuff a lot of news into a small space. This is especially true in TV. Somebody has to decide which stories make it and which do not. When those stories are made on a political bases (and they often are in those m arkets), that person is acting as a censor. So while it is not an equality, it is a significant relationship.
2. Investigative reporting and opinion writing have never been highly specialized skills that must be entrusted to a media elite. No one ought to be surprised that out of several million bloggers, a few manage to break stories that haven’t appeared yet in the mainstream press. It ain’t that hard. Every working journalist has dozens of possible stories in the oven. Nobody has time to get them all done.
Of course. On the other hand, the choice of which items become stories in newspaper land, especially the big MSM, is decided by factors including how the stories matches the editor/producer whatever sees the world. That certain stories are ignored and others highly overplayed is definitely bias. Contrast the attacks on Bush’s National Guard service (and the coverage) with the vague scrutiny given Kerry’s anti-war activities. We heard a lot about a relatively minor incident and its vaying versions (medal throwing) and virtually nothing about his traveling to Paris to meet with the enemy (while still a US Naval Reserve office) and then producing his odios 1971 Senate performance, which is beyond any excuse. The MSM is highly biased in this instance.
Successful journalists got there by:
a. Showing up every day.
b. Working, at least early in their careers, long hours for low pay.
c. Writing with speed and facility.
d. Asking a lot of questions.
e. Not burning out.
That depends a lot on whether they are in the MSM big leages or not.
You can do it, too! The trick is finding somebody who is willing to pay you for it.
Censorship is the selective use of information, not simply deletion. Creative forethought is required, and a willingness to employ information to fabricate something which the unmanipulated information would not alone suggest.
In this way, “original” stores are created all the time in the major print and media outlets. For this reason, The New York Times and the Washington Post are little more than extended editorial pages.
Conjoined idiots. What an asshole.
Arturo:
We are talking about the New York ‘Slime’ and the Washington Compost, how can anyone in there right mind call these pieces of left-wing Garrrr-bage, truth. If truth were a rattle snake those two papers wouldnt know it if it bit them in the ass.
Mark
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