What’s wrong with TV: a theory

In the pet theory department, I’m convinced I can explain why TV news is so bad, and how it happened over the last 30/40 years. My argument dovetails nicely with Postman’s Amusing ourselves to death, which I highly recommend.

Here we go.

For the first 20 years of broadcast television, news was seen as a public service. there were few advertisements & news editors had more of the public interest at heart. Edward R. Murrow’s interviews with McCarthy on See it Now could be described as a the peak of these times.
In 1968, 60 Minutes was born, proving news could be a profit making business for television, being a ratings leader for 20 years in a row. Don Hewitt, the series creator, admits he’s partially responsible for radical changes in news media, by proving profit was there.
In 1970, PBS was created (replacing the fledgling NET). The creation of a national public television network reduced the sense of obligation among major networks to treat the news as a public service, despite their use of public airwaves.
There is evidence that people, when scared or depressed, tend to either purchase more things or spend more money when they do. Advertisers and producers know this and it has to impact their decisions for kinds of shows to air, and how they’re written or produced.
The reporting of crime in news has consistently outpaced crime, often by magnitudes. To paraphrase, according to FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the rate for crimes dropped 8% in the United States between 1990 and 1995. During that same time span, network news coverage of crime increased by over 200 percent.
There is increasing evidence most violent crime is committed by and to people who know each other. Yet shows like CSI, Numbers, etc. emphasize homicides committed by strangers, and frequently feature serial or psychopathic killers (despite the reality). And de-emphasize the role of alcohol or drugs in the committing of these crimes.

My strawman hypothesis: If you broadcast crime & scare people by willfully misrepresenting things, sometimes under the guise of ‘news’ -> you get more profitable advertising, and more TV viewers (since they’re more afraid of doing other things).

But my point is not:

That profit motive is evil
That 1954 was the best year ever
Or that entertainment should reflect reality

Instead it’s that:

Television news of any kind, on any channel, has been influenced by the above list of observations, and for the worse. Postman makes similiar claims, but piecing in 60 minutes & PBS I haven’t heard before.
Most viewers assumptions for how choices are made for what is reported and how it’s reported are not accurate.
It’s no surprise that broadcast news, and much of cable news, has the same lead stories, the same 30 minute sequences of crime, war, weather and sports, mostly represented with the same angle and perspectives. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the consequence of some basic behavior research and the motivation to help advertisers sell products.
There are serious distorting effects on perception of reality that come from watching an average of 6 hours of television a day

What do you think?

Posted Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:16 am

in pop culture | 17 Comments » |

Mary - October 29, 2009 at 12:35 pm

One thing to add: From experience, I know that the aspect of every story the media emphasizes is carefully and purposefully chosen–and this is clearly one more thing that makes TV news bad.

Here is what I mean by this: my house burned down about five years ago. Strangely, little in the local newspaper was about the fire or the family or how to help; instead, it focused on the fact that the accidental fire was started by a piece of hot shrimp. It became a local joke: Oh, your house is the one the shrimp burned down! Ha Ha! I remember that!

Unfortunately, my young son, the one who burned the shrimp, got harassed for it mercilessly, even though he was a minor and his name was left out. His schoolmates knew it was him. Poor kid had to have therapy.

Since that time, when I read about house fires in the news or see them on TV, I have noticed that they are always looking to sensationalize the story, make it something more than an unfortunate accident, and make the poor families suffer more than the fire itself could inflict. This sensationalism, in my mind, is what makes TV news bad.

Scott Berkun - October 29, 2009 at 1:05 pm

Great story Mary – thanks.

It is quite a thing to have a story about you on TV or in news. Suddenly you realize how the story they tell has only a thin relationship to the story you know, or that they’ve chosen to emphasize a trivial part, and make in the centerpiece.

Then you realize this must be true in degrees for most news stories told most of the time.

Jon Stahl - October 29, 2009 at 4:31 pm

TV news is under tremendous economic pressure (as you allude to), and as such, they are trying to produce the most ratings points for the least dollars. This leads them to cover stories that are inexpensive to cover. That means: fast and predictable. Crime stories are easy, because you know in advance exactly where to send your reporters — to the police station. In most cases, you also know the story outline in advance, and just have to fit the facts into the frame. Ditto for weather and sports.

Scott Berkun - October 29, 2009 at 4:43 pm

That’s a good point – I’m a fan of these small heuristics as they make much more sense than conspiracy theories. The cost per story metric explains many things that just happen to have negative social effects. The goal isn’t necessarily the negative social effect, it could just be cost per story.

Bill Drissel - October 29, 2009 at 7:41 pm

Anyone who gets his notions of prevalence from news media gets things all wrong. Bruce Schneier says words like: “Don’t worry about anything you see on TV. It’s only on TV because it almost never happens.”

Carol - October 29, 2009 at 9:31 pm

How do people fit in 6 hours a day? We’re not home and awake 6 hours a day, after getting home from work and making dinner and taking care of other necessities. 99% of everything I watch (unless it’s extreme local weather) is pre-tivoed, and days, if not weeks or seasons old. We stop only for Mac vs PC commercials.

This number of hours must be inflated by people who (like my parents did) leave the TV on every waking hour, watched or not.

Jorge - October 30, 2009 at 3:24 am

The H1N1 (wrongly media-baptized suine flu) daily news coverage we’re getting in Europe attests to Stahl rationale: just be at the hospital or home were this last case happened.
It gets 5mins piece for each travel… outline is the pre-known.

It doesn’t matter that the rate of contamination and deaths is much lower than anticipated and not nearly in public-concern district. There’s no 10min piece on the fact that 3 out of 4 doctors refuse the vaccine… that would take serious, long and detailed investigations.
That takes time and money to do, and all the internships are busy with “gas station robbery” covering.

Dwight Bobson - October 30, 2009 at 7:05 pm

I agree with most of your theory except the PBS influence. It had none. commercial networks could care less about public TV. What influences them is profits. I’m afraid unbridled greed is the culprit.
Remember that the original network owners were broadcasters. Now the owners are anything but … GE, Viacom, Murdock, conglomerate, inc. Networks and news are profit centers right out of some business school case study. The purpose of programming is to maximize profits. The goal: he who has more toys, wins. Of course, in the case of Murdock, assuming you read his history of what he did to the press in England, he has moved from profits to power.
The use of people like Frank Magid to make the news entertaining is the same as using Frank Luntz to create the right words for GOP politicians to make Orwell’s 1984 come true a few years later than he thought it would. Money=Power=Control.
By the way, I read Postman and have believed his truth for some time as it gets reinforced every day.

Mike Nitabach - November 1, 2009 at 3:13 am

You are correct to some extent. However, you are missing a big piece of the puzzle. As one of the other commenters pointed out, teevee news outlets are now *all* wholly owned subsidiaries of massive multinational corporations that use their news outlets as purveyors of propaganda that reinforces their corporate agenda in ways that go *far* beyond simply catering to advertisers.

For example, GE–which owns NBC and MS-NBC–is also a massive war profiteer. This grossly distorts war coverage and increases focus on ridiculous and meaningless “news” like balloon boy and kids falling in wells.

Bob K - November 1, 2009 at 9:59 am

(Your hypothesis, not the reality of it.)

And yes, how do people fit in that much TV? We just don’t watch it (though my kids sometimes get harrassed for it), and I have to say I don’t feel like we’re missing anything.

Thanks, Scott!

Scott Berkun - November 1, 2009 at 11:34 am

I think the 6 hour figure is for hours the television is on, which may include time people are doing other activities while the TV is in the background.

Bo Brock - November 3, 2009 at 3:38 pm

TV news has a very low information density. I worked for a private firm that consulted clients in both new and old media, and the thing that struck me most about TV was that its density was one-tenth that of print media. I found I could “read” a 30-minute newscast in about 2-3 minutes. This helps explain why television news spends so much time on sensational, video-heavy bits: car chases, disasters, weather, etc. That’s where the medium shines — or, to put it less charitably, that’s where text-based media don’t completely outclass it.

False Flag - November 4, 2009 at 12:15 pm

I think the major flaw in your theory occurs at Point 4. Although people buy more things when they are scared or depressed, there is little evidence to suggest that an advertisement that they -see- while they are scared and depressed will cause them to -later- buy the product being advertised. This is a rather big assumption of collusion, and is also the least parsimonious argument. It is just as (if not more) likely that people pay more attention to bad / unusual news, and that TV execs care primarily about number of viewers. This explanation requires no second or third term assumptions about what people do when they are done watching TV, it simply impacts the most realistic and immediate bottom line.

Also, this more parsimonious explanation would help answer the question: If people were simply depressed or scared (as opposed to interested) in the news being presented, why wouldn’t news outlets that present less depressing and scary news be doing better, since presumably people don’t like being depressed and scared, and would choose less depressing news channels.

What I’m getting at here is that you are assuming one extra step than is necessary or realistic. You say:

“It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the consequence of some basic behavior research and the motivation to help advertisers sell products.”

I don’t think that’s the answer. You’re adding, unnecessarily, but step of wanting to help advertisers to sell products. That’s not really what’s going on. It’s about “getting people to watch the channel.” That’s all that’s required.

Also, I might add that the title of your posting seems to be more about broadcast news than TV in general =)

Richard Marr - November 16, 2009 at 2:40 am

I’d agree there’s a lot of weight to arguments about perception of risk being distorted by a wide-reaching media focusing on the extremes (I liked Dan Gardner’s book ‘Risk’), but I also think there’s something else making our ears willing to believe that things are getting worse.

From Hagakure: “It is said that what is called “the spirit of an age” is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world’s coming to an end.”

That 18th century samurai felt their world was coming to an end isn’t surprising, as change was encroaching and their world was in fact coming to an end. If you’re afraid of change, which most of us are to some extent, of course you believe that the change you fear is a bad thing.

If we’re subconsciously looking for reasons to justify our fear of change, it’s not hard to find them in TV broadcasts, even if the events portrayed are rare and remote.

Leszek Cyfer - November 28, 2009 at 10:39 am

It seems that expediency factor has kicked in – what’s tension releaving kicked out what’s goal achieving…

Perhaps TV news will be reborn as an internet platform, with youtube-style movies, and many different, amateur and official aggregators – people who view the clips, find those they find importanr and put them on their aggregation pages, according to the theme, with ranking and short explanation.

Some of them will search clips for breaking news – what’s going on at the moment, some will concentrate on crime, poverty, natural catastrophes, but also will be those who dig stories of hope, fun, things that are important to learn and grow as a person, music, DIY, fishing, sports, education etc.

Add to this search and set-up channel system and people can create their own TV channels they can watch, stop/rewind, comment etc.

Makes Me Think