What is news ? There are several ways to answer this question : ( 1 ) The standard and still dominant way is to define news as reporting on visible events that are, well, new. Events that are out of the ordinary, and especially --since news has warnings of danger as a very important purpose-- bad news, things that effect us adversely. ( 2 ) USA TODAY "good news." Upbeat stories, related to the Hallmark Channel's TV dramas that accentuate the positive. This might also be called news for people who live in cocoons, who live on islands ( figuratively ) where everything is well-ordered and nice, where ugly reality is unwelcome. ( 3 ) Partisan news, think most of the mainstream press and think of talk radio, and --maybe most of all-- think of the blogosphere with ideological ranting 24/7. This kind of news is almost always tilted Left or Right, like MSNBC and Democracy Now, which are not quite Leninist in their outlook, or think of Hannity on Fox, his brand of conservatism up and down the line, no exceptions. There is also very partisan Green news, and while it doesn't have much of a following nationally, news as interpreted by the Constitution Party. ( 4 ) Entertainment / entertaining news --as distinguished from news about entertainment, such as "E." Fox has gone into entertainment news with two shows that are completely worthless and an insult to everyone's intelligence, The Five, and Redeye. What such shows are, is news for complete imbeciles. Pure garbage, in other words. Not that entertainment news shows cannot be thought of that might be worthwhile, but so far none exist in this genre, at least that I know about. ( 5 ) Ha-ha everybody laugh, distorted news, viz, news that is deliberately skewed for the sake of comedy, such as various news-humorist shows or Saturday Night Live. Perfectly acceptable approach to news since no-one takes such shows all that seriously and their value comes with comic relief. Except that, of course, for some people this is their news. ( 6 ) Speciality news --of which there are a number of competing brands, business, weather, sports, religion, the military, etc, with wide-open niches still available for computers and home owners ( the later partly filled with "This Old House" and similar programs , with computer "news" still largely the province of HSN and QVC and the Web ). ( 7 ) Brainfood news, of which C-Span is the prime example, but with examples elsewhere, as with Fox TV's top quality Special Report, which is based on the Sunday news-analysis shows of the major networks. In this category also belongs the news as reported in the pages of Reason magazine, which is libertarian in philosophy but might better be thought of as free speech in character and often simply as non-partisan. The article about CNN completely misses # 7 , which is what is most relevant. If the "real purpose" of news is understanding motivations, comprehending implications of events, foreseeing the future in order to position ourselves for what is coming down the road, then great debates about reportorial details are not quite meaningless. As many of us knew from day # 1 of the Boston tragedy, there was strong possibility that the bombers were Muslims. If so, which turned out to be the case, then there are enormous implications for Islam in America and in other democracies, enormous implications for education and public policy, and enormous political implications. No, it wasn't just CNN that dropped the ball. ALL the major news organizations dropped the ball. Only Fox TV, and then only to a very limited extent, even began to see things for what they are, a story about Islam and about religion in America, and about the demographics that underlie these major cultural factors. Fox also dropped the ball, in other words, even if not quite as badly as CNN, or other news outlets. This is what news coverage of the Boston bombings was really all about. Billy =================================================== NY Times The Pressure to Be the TV News Leader Tarnishes a Big Brand By _DAVID CARR_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/david_carr/index.html)
Like a lot of Americans, when I woke up on Friday morning and found out there was a manhunt in the Boston area for the remaining suspect in Monday’s bombing at the marathon, I turned on CNN. It’s a common impulse, although less common than it used to be. The news audience has been chopped up into ideological camps, and CNN’s middle way has been clobbered in the ratings. The legacy networks’ news divisions can still flex powerful muscles on big stories, and _Twitter_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and other real-time social media sites have seduced a whole new cohort of news consumers. But the biggest damage to CNN has been self-inflicted — never more so than in June, when in a rush to be first, it came running out of the Supreme Court saying that President Obama’s _health care law_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_ma naged_care/health_care_reform/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) had been overturned. It was a hugely embarrassing error. Still, when big news breaks, we instinctively look to CNN. We want CNN to be good, to be worthy of its moment. That impulse took a beating last week. On Wednesday at 1:45 p.m., the correspondent John King reported that _a suspect had been arrested_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/business/media/fbi-criticizes-false-reports-of-a-bombing-arrest.html) . It was a big scoop that turned out to be false. Mr. King, a good reporter in possession of a bad set of facts, was joined by The Associated Press, Fox News, The Boston Globe and others, but the stumble could not have come at a worse time for CNN. When viewers arrived in droves — the audience tripled to 1.05 million, from 365,000 the week before, according to Nielsen ratings supplied by Horizon Media — CNN failed in its core mission. It was not the worst mistake of the week — The New York Post all but fingered two innocent men in a front-page picture — but it was a signature error for a live news channel. CNN has been in the middle of a rehabilitation ever since _Jeff Zucker_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/z/jeff_zucker/inde x.html?inline=nyt-per) was appointed at the end of last year to run CNN Worldwide. Until now, the defining story in the Zucker era had been a doomed cruise ship that lost power and was towed to port, where its beleaguered passengers dispersed. This week, CNN seemed a lot like that ship. It’s clear after a busy week that Mr. Zucker can hire all the talent he wants, broaden the scope of their coverage and freshen the look of the joint, but if the network continues to whiff on the big stories, all of that will be for naught. Two people I spoke to at the network, which featured a lot of good work and tireless reporting when it wasn’t getting it wrong, called the error “devastating.” Twitter and commentators vibrated with umbrage — “_Breaking News Is Broken_ (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/04/boston_bombing_breaking_news_don_t_watch_cable_shut_off_twitter_you_d_be.html) ” suggested a headline on Slate — all asking some version of how can this keep happening. Here’s how: As a general practice, wall-to-wall live television reporting is perilous. Maybe instead of the constant images of police tape, television news should frame their own coverage with a virtual version, indicating that viewers proceed at their own risk. Despite the suggestion otherwise, people who are on the air talking about the news cannot report while they are doing it. Producers make hundreds of decisions on the fly. The incrementalism and vamping required to fill the hours — “Again, as we have been saying, Anderson ... ” — makes everyone desperate to say anything vaguely new. Throughout the week, I saw anchors and reporters staring at their phones, hoping a new nugget might arrive to give them something to say. (Memo to television executives everywhere: news is a better product when presenters look at the camera.) And the live environment means that at a certain point, the bosses have to quit shouting into the ear piece, trusting their staff and crossing their fingers. Several people involved in reporting the Boston bombing case said the story presented particular challenges. In a large-scale assault on public safety, the audience wants to know everything, right this second. Yes, they want you to be accurate, but the implicit promise of a 24-hour news service is that it will happen quickly. The pressure to produce is ratcheted up accordingly. Editors and producers begin leaning on their reporters, and they, in turn, end up in the business of wish fulfillment, working hard to satisfy their audience, and meeting the expectations of their bosses. It creates a system in which bad reporting can thrive and dominoes can quickly fall the wrong way. In the instance of the Boston story, the scope of the crime, the number of victims and the fact that it smacked of terror on American shores provoked a vast law enforcement response at the federal and local level. A multiagency array of command centers and responsibilities created a target-rich environment for reporters. But it also created an unwieldy patchwork of sources, all operating in the fog of war, albeit a domestic one. By Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began to hold information much more closely. That left other local and federal agencies less in the know, but that did not stop reporters from approaching them. It wasn’t long before those who did know weren’t talking, and those who talked did not know. Mr. King, a native of the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, was deeply sourced with local law enforcement officials, but people covering the story suggested those sources were out of the loop by Wednesday. “It was never a local case to begin with, and then it was decided to button it up to prevent further leaks,” a former law enforcement official told me. Up until then, Mr. King had been having a very good run in Boston. After losing his anchor spot on CNN, he was in the middle of demonstrating value on the reporting side and was straining to own the story. But even good reporters with good sources can end up with stories that go bad, and keep in mind that The Associated Press — a stalwart in breaking news and Mr. King’s former employer — was reporting the same thing. Its reporting gave him someone to hold hands with on a breaking development. In a statement, CNN said that it had “three credible sources on both local and federal levels. Based on this information we reported our findings. As soon as our sources came to us with new information, we adjusted our reporting.” (At least Mr. King dialed back his story in plain sight. The A.P. oddly continued to stand by its report with a mealy-mouthed statement.) So what is the real damage of a midweek stumble in a very complicated story? When the story was breaking on Friday, CNN had its biggest nonelection rating in 10 years. People at CNN said that they got significant blowback from sources, but Mr. Zucker seemed fine with the overall effort, issuing a hero-gram to the staff on Friday, before the final chapter unfolded. “All of you, across every division of CNN Worldwide, have done exceptional work,” the memo read. “And when we made a mistake, we moved quickly to acknowledge it and correct it.” That’s one way to spin it. I talked to several competitors who did not commit the same error, and one spoke for many when he said: “It was bad enough — really, really bad — so that they made all of us look terrible. Nobody comes away a winner from something like this.” If legacy media were falling short, the new order did not look all that promising either. A crowd-sourced witch hunt took place on Reddit, identifying innocents as suspects, and Twitter was alive with both misinformation and outrage at the mistakes. (There were many curiously triumphal posts about the death of old media in Twitter feeds that were full of links to that same old media.) Part of the reason that we still want CNN to be great is that at a moment when information and news seem to have done a jailbreak — bursting forth everywhere in all sorts of ways — it would be nice to have a village common where a reliable provider of news held the megaphone. By marketing itself as the most trusted name in news, CNN is and should be held to a higher standard. After the erroneous report of a capture, CNN’s reporters and anchors seemed to have taken a deep breath and proceeded with caution. On Friday, the network got an early jump on the story, but stayed on cat’s paws throughout the day, issuing regular caveats on every bit of information. In the end, NBC broke the news first. When the news finally broke with certainty — in a sign of the times, the Boston Police Department _confirmed it on Twitter_ (https://twitter.com/Boston_Police/status/325409894830329856) before many outlets, including CNN, did — chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” could be heard on the streets. But even as Mr. Obama took to the air to cite the police work that made that moment possible, he talked about the reporting that fell short. “In this age of instant reporting and tweets and blogs, there’s a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions, ” he said, his face turning sour as he spoke. “But when a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it’s important that we do this right. That’s why we have investigations. That’s why we relentlessly gather the facts.” Like everyone else, the president wants to have a press that is equal to the people it serves. He wants CNN to be good. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
