...On the Nightly News The past few nights I have managed to catch that monstrosity called 'The Evening News'. I stopped watching the news sometime in the late 90's when the web finally became a far better tool to gauge what was really news, what was spin and what was fluff. The fact that television news is forced to put heavy emphasis on things like fire and disaster and human interest stories because of the visual nature of the news has always seemed to me disengenuous, so I just tuned off and read my daily trifecta of Salon,The NY Times, and the Village Voice, the combination of all three usually filters out the propaganda and the outright lies. In any event, watching television news was such a revalation! It wasn't that the fact that there is no 'hard' news coverage. Actually, hard news coverage averages about ten minutes, regardlessof whether the show is 30 or 60 minutes, but this is something I knew. I wasn't even all that shocked at the UPN's practice of creating a 'special interest story' based on the preceding show (ie: "Does Buffy go to far in showing sex?"...which by the time it aired had changed to 'Should gays show affection publicly?"). Instead, I was shocked to discover a special on epileptic cats, a hair cream that is supposedly causing girls to sexually mature faster and a feature story on whether 8 glasses of water a day is too much. Yeah, I know- this is typical, and in these dark days we should just accept whatever crap we are fed and make ironic hipster jokes about it, but I watched these specials carefully and discovered that it was all set-up and no delivery. Invariably, the investigator makes a shocking allegation and then, after interviewing an expert on the subject, takes the expert's casual generalized platitude and uses it as proof. For instance- in the case of the titty inducing hair cream, the investigator seeks out a dermatologist who says nothing about the hair cream's maturity inducing effects, but instead, encourages parents to read the label on things they buy.... So, quid pro quo, the hair cream makes girls develop faster? In the case of the '8 glasses of water' story on UPN, a reporter makes wild allegations about how 'Everyone thinks 8 glasses of water a day is good enough for you, but is it?' After interviewing the Man on the Street ('Dave Prendell, Water Drinker' is how he is credited) we meet an expert, who basiclly says that water is good for you, but doesn't know where the 8 cup thing came from. End of Story. This really makes me want to scream. Am I being a prude? I mean, is 'journalistic responsibility' an arcane idea? I know, I know- I'm talking about UPN and the WB...just because the bottom of the barrel is rotten, that doesn't mean the whole bushel is bad, right? Right? Well, then check out what Paula Zahn was talking about this morning on CNN.

posted by Japhy at 5/24/2002 05:28:00 PM || #