Feb 272006
I saw Good Night, and Good Luck over the weekend and ever since then, I’ve been craving Scotch and cigarettes. At the end of the film, Murrow blasts television as an escapist, superficial medium that has failed to live up to its promise as a tool for creating an educated and enlightened citizenry. He proposes setting aside a few hours a week for current-affairs programming. I wonder what he would make of today’s television landscape. Today’s viewers have a wealth of informative and educational programming available to them, if they choose to seek it out. Most television news reporting, however, is abysmal. The cable news outlets rarely do a story that runs longer than five minutes. What passes for “analysis” is a series of disembodied heads reciting the prepared talking points of one side of the debate or the other. It’s predictable. It’s boring. Worse, it breeds the kind of political apathy and disengagement that is rampant in this country.
Maybe we need to allow smoking in the nation’s newsrooms again. Maybe the type of reporter who smokes three packs a day is the kind of reporter who might fearlessly pursue the stories that need to be told.
The BBC here in the UK have a few good news analysis programmes on TV and Radio (good as in the analysis is good – the news isn’t normally). However, the TV ones are late at night, after ten thirty when most people’s brains have turned off even if they are not actually asleep.
Personally I prefer the radio. If you go to the BBC radio page you can open a player which will allow you to listen to almost any BBC radio programme whenever you like. That’s at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio
Here in Canada, I make time to watch current-affairs programming on CBC every night. It’s a news magazine show called the National.
Regarding your point about modern media, that is a higher awareness and larger population that do care about getting news. Political media has caught on to the effectiveness of this medium and has turned it into a propaganda machine rather than a forum of intelligent discovery.
Didn’t crave the cigarettes, but I wanted the scotch and to listen to some good jazz singer after the movie.