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ABC, CBS & NBC:
The Big, Dead, Three-Headed Dog
By David Keele
It’s almost become redundant to
disparage the elite establishment press corps, to criticize the mass media.
I did say almost didn’t I?
What’s an aspiring columnist to do?
Like Mel Gibson’s Sir William Wallace in “Braveheart”,
I’m going to pick a fight. Like
Wallace, it’s a fight I can’t win; however, it’s a fight that’s going to
be won by people who follow after me. This
fight isn’t about winning the war; it’s about going to battle.
I’m not playing to win; I’m playing not to lose.
By ‘mass media’ I refer to the
Big Three national news corporations—ABC, CBS, NBC and to a lesser extent the
mainstream print magazines and newspapers such as Newsweek and Time,
The New York Times & The Washington Post.
The television threesome
collectively earned lower ratings for a political convention this year, down an
average of 11% from 2000’s ratings, during their single hour coverage (ABC,
CBS and NBC’s that is, to be fair) of last month’s Democratic National
Convention as compared. They aired one live hour of DNC coverage for three out
of its four nights. They managed to
skip one night of coverage altogether. They
were making room for the latest invasive, exploiting reality television series
or the all-important summer rerun showings of painfully unfunny situational
comedies or unintentionally bombastic dramadies.
Since the NCAA Basketball regular
season and post-season tournament ended three months prior to July’s DNC in
early April, I wonder what or who Dan Rather and his ABC and NBC counterparts
will blame for the cause of the Big Three’s decline in political convention
ratings. Major league baseball
doesn’t air on ABC, CBS or NBC. That
leaves golf, the Athens Olympic trials and tennis; Rather and company might
become desperate enough to blame them if August’s Republican National
Convention picks up where it’s DNC counterpart left off last month.
It’s a crying shame that in
great numbers the American people still consider Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings
and Dan Rather to be among the most trusted names in broadcast news, in all of
mediums of news. You can’t trust
any professional journalist who doesn’t consider the DNC and the RNC worth
covering from beginning to end. To
his credit, Donaldson did cover the DNC from start to finish on the Internet.
He can do better; Jennings and Rather can certainly do better.
We deserve better and more from them.
I’ve come to expect very little from them, as I’ve grown older, wiser
or at least well informed.
Adv:
What
does the government know about you?
I’d be the first one to applaud
them for their lack of extensive and in-depth coverage of the Democrats and the
Republicans during a presidential election year if they were protesting the
corruption running wild in the two political monstrosities.
I wouldn’t think of it as counterproductive; I’d think it was pretty
revolutionary. All kidding aside
though, they’re not protesting the corrupt politicians in Washington D.C.
On the contrary, they’re joining
ranks with them lock, step and key. Yes,
the failure of the Big Three to properly cover one of the two possible
presidential teams voting Americans will elect to the highest offices in the
land this November smells of corruption. Have they forgotten that the next president and the next
vice-president will lead America and the freedom-loving world for at least the
next four years? Isn’t reporting
on the Democratic and the Republican presidential teams in total more important
than securing the latest top ratings number?
Those of us who watched or who were given the opportunity to watch the
entire DNC on cable news television, the Internet or listened to it on the radio
certainly know the answer to that question.
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Whatever happened to them
reporting and us deciding? Please
forgive me; I had the slogans of the Big Three confused with the slogan of the
Fox News Channel. We’ll leave the
discussion of the accuracy of that FNC slogan for another place and for another
time. For now, we’ll agree that
it’s a noble slogan if it’s upheld. A
more descriptive slogan of the Big Three’s DNC coverage would be: We Decided Not To Report or We Decided It Wasn’t Very
Worthy Of Reporting.
I loathe the bulk of the cable
news networks’ regular commentating and reporting.
If I come across one more piece of ‘breaking news’ about an
attractive Caucasian woman who’s either a criminal or the victim of a crime, I
think I’ll switch to cartoons permanently.
Yet I appreciate the cable news networks reporting for duty at the DNC; I
appreciate them for fulfilling my expectations, even exceeding them.
The Big Three were a big disappointment as usual.
Dan Rather defended the Big Three’s corporate news organizations,
claiming that three hours of political convention coverage would get worse
ratings than running a test pattern across the screen.
That may be true and it may not be true.
Regardless, at least we could count on the test pattern to do its job
right.
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