Last night on the ABC evening news, which has a little more than 20 minutes of actual news reporting in the 30-minute slot, the **lead **story was that Tiger Woods was going to give a press conference in two days. Believe it or not, this went on for almost seven minutes, with various talking heads musing on what he might be going to say.
I can’t help but believe that there might have been some newsworthy events in the entire world more important than this non-story. Then again tonight, another several minutes on a non-news story about Tiger.
Celebrity mania trumps serious news every time, I guess. I expect it on local news programs, but on a national network?
The scary thing is that so many people get their news only from television.
Wow, that’s … right! (Well, if you have to watch American news that is. Fortunately I rarely do) I was expecting you to recommend Fox news (I thoguht all conservatives watched it religiously)
Years ago a friend of mine who was a TV producer told me that if you take out all the fluff from a 30 minute news broadcast - the ads, the intros, the segues between stories, the chat between the TV heads, the visuals without commentary, the non-news stories etc - there are less words than on a single page of a daily newspaper.
It is really instructive to tape a news or current affairs program and watch it again just paying attention to what is being said and shown. The paucity of genuine factual content, once you weed out the emotionally appealing stuff, is quite horrifying.
I was tearing my hair this morning because I wanted to hear about the guy who crashed an airplane into that building, but Good Morning America* kept going on and on about this golfer who keeps sticking himself into the wrong holes! I imagined the ghost of the plane guy wondering, “What the hell does it take to be the lead story around here?”
The Tiger Woods apology was the front-page story (with a big write-up and color photo) in yesterday’s Boston Globe. Pepper Mill was disgusted, pointing out lots of more important stories (most of them about our corrupt politicians).