Ravenwood - 04/19/04 08:00 AM
CBS' signature news program infomerical, 60 Minutes, featured another author this month. Last month they were giving wall to wall coverage to Dick Clarke and his book about the events leading up to 9/11. This weekend, they gave wall to wall coverage to Bob Woodward and his book about the events leading up to the Iraq war. Both books are published by CBS' parent company Viacom which leads us to believe this was nothing more than a cleverly disguised sales video.
Of course this isn't anything new for CBS. Last year they tried to strike a deal with Jessica Lynch for a prime time interview. They promised to make Lynch famous by offering her a prime time special on CBS, airtime on MTV, and a possible book deal with Viacom owned Simon and Schuster.
The concept of "news" certainly has changed in recent years.
Category: Blaming the Media
Comments (1) top link me
The only reliable audience for news is women who like soap opera. It would be nice if there was a market for hard news, but there isn't. Not enough to support news departments anyway.
So everything is a Princess Diana event, only without the princess. She turns out to have been unnecessary.
Required are: 1) a tie-in to some eternal drama in life, eg. powerful man goes bad or untrustworthy; and 2) it must be relatable to the woman's own life (``how like my own situation!''). Consider that women-in-peril stories are exclusively about young white girls. The white woman audience is bigger.
The concept of ``news'' in journalism schools is what can be sold by journalism professors, who are tenured and have an audience of idealistic earnest young people. A market success.
It is not what happens in the real world, because there the audience is dysfunctional women. They'd like another audience, but there is no other reliable audience they can gather with any other sort of programming. The product of news media is this dysfunctional audience, not news. They sell their product, the audience, to advertisers.
The posture of being news is marketing to flatter this dysfunctional audience (``you are serious people'').
How can it be fixed? I suggest ridicule, chiefly of the audience.
Big mistake to give women the vote.
(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
