“Feeding frenzy” was a term that kept coming up whenever media critics dissected the collective behavior of the television press during the never-ending year of Monica news.
You saw the pictures: camera crews surrounding grand-jury witnesses, hurling questions, often blocking their way to get a closer shot. Many witnesses needed escorts to get through what often looked like a pack of wild animals, shouting, shoving or even pawing the people they were there to cover.
With the Republicans breathlessly in pursuit of Bill Clinton’s political scalp, TV coverage often functioned like an echo chamber, resounding with self- righteousness, moralizing and a steady drumbeat of zealousness.
If the polls are to be believed, the crazed carnivore-like behavior, along with the endless one-note coverage and commentary, only rallied the public behind the man in the White House, in effect impeaching TV news and its credibility in the public eye.
Now that the president has been acquitted, will the media attack dogs be leashed and put back into their cages? Will a new order of civility take over?
I wouldn’t bet on it. For one thing, the Republicans say they are still on the war path, even if it means driving off a cliff. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has vowed to fight on, while William Kristol, editor of the rabid Weekly Standard, says simply, “It ain’t over, not by a long shot.”
This is music to the ears of the TV news machine, which thrives on conflict and confrontation. If you consider news just another programming format, as the industry does, there isn’t much difference between news and other shows.
Have you noticed that as televised wrestling becomes more wild, so do the pundit shows, where yelling and screaming is now a staple? News divisions are increasingly accountable to entertainment executives; they utilize Hollywood formulas in their programming, e.g., three acts, character conflict and narrative arcs.
The saturation coverage of the OJ Simpson trial proved that news could be packaged as a sitcom, and that scandal and sensationalism are legit for big networks. It is a format that has since been fine-tuned, with “enhancement elements”—graphics, music and a revolving commentariat of freelance “soundbite artists.”
The trade magazine closest to the TV industry, Electronic Media, predicts that there will be more of the same because the system requires it: “The proliferation of 24-hour news channels has created a system in which one piece of scandal news is often stretched into 24 hours of analysis, hypothesis and all-news network avarice for no-brainer programming.”
The cable networks are under pressure to find “TNBS” (The Next Big Scandal). News executives are admitting publicly to fears that with the end of the impeachment trial, their ratings will plummet by as much as 50 percent.
“It seems that in the news cycle, there are hills and valleys and I think we are heading into a valley for a while,” says Fox News chair Roger Ailes, the onetime Republican media adviser. “We have been anticipating this for some time,” adds NBC’s Tom Brokaw. “We have some things in the works.”
But what? A return to sober-minded journalism, or more beating the bushes for a new sensation to flog to death? The high-minded in the industry want to focus on vital issues such as health care or the economy or technology. But the bottom-liners, who are in control, love the adrenaline rush of going for the jugular. Without missing a beat, the Fox News Channel had four JonBenet Ramsey stories ready to air as soon as the president’s trial was over.
Trying to outdo Fox, MSNBC, which has done more to exploit the Clinton scandals than any of its competitors, is positioning itself further to the right. It has added Oliver North, who admitted lying to Congress during its Iran/Contra probe, as a new talkshow host, and contracted for more tendentious screaming matches led by that old Nixon warhorse, John McLaughlin. [See page 4.]
So it seems that the News Zoo, the camera as carnivore, is here to stay. As a cameraman on the Monica beat outside the White House explained to me, “This is not a story, it is an industry.”
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Danny Schechter, a former producer for CNN and ABC’s 20/20, is now executive produce of Globalvision. His book on news, The More You Watch, The Less You Know, has recently been released in paperback by Seven Stories Press.
This op-ed appeared in Long Island Newsday (3/1/99).
