TV Entertainment and the News Media

Grandma was one of the sweetest, funniest, most caring ladies I’ve ever met. She sang to me, played with me, encouraged me, and doted on me like any grandmother would. She was also a southern Pentecostal preacher—the fire-and-brimstone kind, who never needed a microphone to make herself heard. When she took the pulpit, she transformed from my loving and gentle grandmother into a fiery, intimidating, no-nonsense messenger of the Almighty. Once she hit her stride, she would puncutate-tuh! every important word-duh! and phrase-uh!, a style I would recognize later in the speeches of Martin Luther King. Like so many of her generation, Grandma lived a difficult life full of hard work and sacrifice. In short, she had abundant wisdom and a great deal of common sense.

So we were amused when she took an interest in professional TV wrestling. Mom tried to explain to her that it was mostly staged, but Grandma was having none of it. We all realized it was a form of theater, but she was convinced it was real. As a child, I found it somehow cute and endearing, yet still puzzling.

Decades later, I’m similarly bemused by another phenomenon. Across the country, otherwise sensible people seem to buy into another kind of theater, constantly played out on network news.

To be fair, Grandma and her generation didn’t have a lot of experience with television. In those days there wasn’t much variety in programming choices, and if you had a favorite show, you arranged your schedule to watch it. You didn’t really think much about who paid for the programming or why. When wrestling aired, she was convinced she had a ringside seat to real battles, and she was riveted.

On the other hand, our generation should know better.

Television exists to attract viewers; to reach viewers, advertisers fund the TV media. How do news broadcasters attract viewers? The same way any brand attracts customers. They segment their market. They study the demographics. They differentiate their programming, advertise to convince us that their programs appeal to our values, and then work to emotionally involve us with their content. Slogans reinforce our attraction to the brand. “The Most Trusted Name in News.” “Fair and Balanced.” “The Best Political Team on Television.” “We Report, You Decide.”

The 24-hour news cycle created a fiercely competitive news environment. Since CNN launched in 1980, more than seventy 24-hour news channels sprang up worldwide. It’s no surprise that news channels work to give us the kind of content that we like, that will keep us coming back for more.

Now and then, major events push the big news networks into something resembling journalism, especially in the early coverage of such events. They disseminate the facts, dissect the sources, and try to piece together an informative story. In between these events, however, the coverage of so-called “news” deteriorates into spin, drama, talking points, and sensationalism. Heroes and villains, winners and losers, rich and poor, right and wrong, right and left, black and white.

Maybe it is interesting. And maybe it conveys information. But let’s not pretend that it’s truly informative. Like professional wrestling, some of it may be real, but much of it is theater. Entertaining, but devoid of real substance.

The fractured and fragmented nature of media now places new demands on serious people. If we want to be told we’re right, if we want to be entertained, and if we want to feed our confirmation bias, we can restrict ourselves to our favorite news channel. After all, they build their businesses telling us what we want to hear, in the way that we want to hear it. But if we want to be truly informed about what’s going on in the world, we must actively seek out the information ourselves, from various and sometimes conflicting sources. Professional journalism still exists, and the Internet provides plenty of competent amateur journalism as well. It takes some work to find it. But the news media giants showed us long ago that ratings are far more important than journalistic integrity.

The professional wrestling world is pretty harmless to its fans. But the world of news media influences our thinking, and shapes our decisions on important choices. In a free society, we take our opinions to the voting booth. Our representative governments, and the policies they enact, will always be a reflection of how well we collectively did our homework before we voted. In this crazy world, with all the issues we face, shouldn’t it be worth it to do your own homework?