Happy Talk News Covers a War

[Guest guest]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/arts/18RICH.html?th

 

July 18, 2004

FRANK RICH

Happy Talk News Covers a War

 

UP to a point, it's fun to howl at Will Ferrell's

priceless portrayal of Ron Burgundy, the fictional

local TV news star at the center of " Anchorman. " The

movie is set in the prehistoric era of the 1970's,

when such infotainment inventions as Action News and

Eyewitness News were still in their infancy. With his

big ego, big lapels, big ties, big hair and pea-sized

brain, Ron is every newsman who's ever told us " This

is what's happening in your world tonight! " while

remaining clueless about anything happening beyond his

own teleprompter. Ron Burgundy has only one flaming

passion: to end up in the big time of network news.

 

You have to laugh — until you realize that he and

countless others like him have made just that leap in

the three decades since. The local news revolution

nailed in this movie — the dictum that the popularity

of a news " personality " with the viewers, not the

story, must always come first — has long since overrun

most of both network and cable news. (The occasional

holdout, typified by " Nightline, " must often fight for

its life or be subsidized at PBS.) No sooner do we

rejoice at the demise of much of the 70's cultural

detritus lampooned in " Anchorman, " from polyester

leisure suits to unembarrassed on-camera sexism, than

we start wondering if TV news may be even more

farcical now than it was then. But these days the

farce isn't so funny. The worst damage committed by

Ron Burgundy at the movie's mythical News Center 4 of

San Diego is to overplay the pregnancy of a panda at

the San Diego Zoo. Our news culture, and not just TV

news, muffed the run-up to a war.

 

Watching Mr. Ferrell go on TV to promote " Anchorman "

on the eve of its premiere, you had to notice just how

plausibly his buffoonish, supposedly anachronistic,

fictional persona fits into our " real " news. He turned

up in his Burgundy blazer on the " Today " show the same

morning The New York Post broke its front-page

exclusive on John Kerry's choice of Dick Gephardt as

his running mate. " This is an excellent journalism

periodical, " said Mr. Ferrell while thumbing through

the offending tabloid before the crowd of " Today " show

groupies in Rockefeller Center. Thus we watched a

fictional anchorman mocking a fictional story from a

real newspaper on a real news program — but was it so

clear which was which? Only a week earlier, " Today "

had committed its own equivalent of The Post's gaffe

by failing to broadcast the live story of Saddam

Hussein's court appearance in Baghdad. It stuck

instead with an interview in which Robert Redford

promoted a new movie in which he does not play Bob

Woodward.

 

When Mr. Ferrell turned up on " The Daily Show " the

next night, Jon Stewart ribbed him for not basing his

characterization of Ron Burgundy on the fake anchorman

Mr. Stewart himself plays on TV. But such is the

vacuum now often left by the real news that Mr.

Stewart's fake anchor is increasingly drafted to do

the job of a real one. One recent instance occurred

after Dick Cheney appeared on CNBC on June 17. The

CNBC interviewer, Gloria Borger, asked the vice

president about his public assertion that a connection

between the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and Saddam

Hussein's government was " pretty well confirmed. " Not

once but three times Mr. Cheney said that he

" absolutely " had " never said " any such thing. But Ms.

Borger had been right. And it was left to Mr. Stewart,

not her actual TV news colleagues, to come to her

defense by displaying the incontrovertible proof on

" The Daily Show " : a clip from " Meet the Press " in

December 2001, in which the vice president flatly told

Tim Russert " it's been pretty well confirmed " that

Atta met with " a senior official of the Iraqi

intelligence service. "

 

Then again, maybe Mr. Cheney thought he could lie to

Ms. Borger because he mistook CNBC, home to Dennis

Miller, for a fake news outlet. That isn't hard to do.

In another stop on his " Anchorman " promotional tour,

Mr. Ferrell crashed the set of that network's " real "

business news program, " Power Lunch, " where he spewed

false headlines ( " Kenneth Lay likes to wear makeup as

a woman! " ) and repeatedly kissed its normally staid

female anchor, Sue Herera, on the lips. Far from

disowning this invasion of fiction into its

journalism, CNBC turned the incident into a constantly

replayed promotional clip. The real anchor hardly

seemed to mind, telling Jacques Steinberg of The New

York Times that she enjoyed showing viewers " a

different side of me. " You can't get much more

Burgundian than that.

 

If each generation gets the Hollywood treatment of TV

journalism that it deserves, then " Anchorman, " however

hit-and-miss its humor, is our " Network " and

" Broadcast News. " " Network " (1976) satirized a network

news operation's willingness to offer any

sensationalized spectacle, even an anchor's televised

suicide, to win the ratings war. " Broadcast News "

(1987) showed us how slick looks and telegenic charm

can trump reporting talent and integrity as assets in

the race to the top of TV news stardom. " Anchorman "

grandfathers in the concerns of the other two but

shows how the desperation of would-be news stars to

create likable on-screen personas (to be a

" newsonality, " as The Washington Post critic Tom

Shales labeled one pioneer of the breed, Kelly Lange

of KNBC in Los Angeles, in 1977) can mean forsaking

journalism entirely.

 

" Anchorman " gets its history right: this toxic element

was first injected into the media bloodstream by

innovations in local news at the dawn of the 70's. One

of its earliest sightings was in New York, where Al

Primo, a news director at WABC, brought Eyewitness

News in late 1968. Looked at today at the Museum of

Television and Radio, the early on-air promos for this

then-novel brand of news are revelatory of what was to

come and even funnier than the parodies of them in

" Anchorman. "

 

In one, the young Geraldo Rivera brings the fellow

members of his news " team " to a Puerto Rican wedding

so that his ethnic " friends, " seemingly played by

actors, can get to know his WABC " friends. " The next

thing you know, one of the anchors, the grim Roger

Grimsby, is shedding his sports jacket and hitting the

dance floor with a sizzling Latina mama. The

commercial's sell line: " The Eyewitness News Team: The

reason people like them so much is that they like

people so much. " In 13 months, WABC doubled its

ratings at 6 and 11, starting a nationwide stampede by

local stations to ditch their authority-figure anchors

for happy-talking surrogate news " families " of their

own.

 

The format officially crossed over into network news

in 1973, when ABC hired Frank Magid, a consultant who

specialized in these theatrics, to develop the morning

show, " AM America. " Built around a surrogate TV family

and outfitted like a suburban home, it begat " Good

Morning America " two years later. The rest is

metastasis. " By the nineties, the tail was wagging the

dog, " wrote the critic Steven D. Stark. " Now, local

news was setting the journalistic standard for the

networks. "

 

Some of this influence is merely a matter of style:

that faux familial intimacy is now visible on any TV

news show, national or local, with more than a single

anchor. (Even the once Audio-Animatronic anchors of

CNN's " Headline News " simulate husband-and-wife banter

these days.) More crucially, the premium placed on

likability affects the content of the news. Since

9/11, this has meant wearing and hawking the flag (as

long as it's not draped on a coffin) — even to the

point of dressing the NBC on-screen peacock icon in

the stars and stripes for weeks. It has also meant not

challenging a president as long as he's riding high in

the polls.

 

In the now legendary White House press conference of

March 6, 2003, not a single reporter, electronic or

print, asked a tough question about anything,

including the president's repeated conflating of 9/11

with the impending war on Iraq (eight times in that

appearance alone). To some critics on the left, this

Stepford Wives performance indicated a press corps

full of conservatives, but I doubt it. This lock-step

spectacle was at least in part an exercise of the

Burgundy principle of pandering: don't do anything

that might make you less popular with your customers.

In that same month, Frank N. Magid Associates, still a

major player in the news consulting business, released

a survey telling its clients that war protests came in

dead last of all topics tested among 6,400 viewers

nationwide. In other words, if you're covering the

news based on what's happening as opposed to what your

viewers like, you're taking a commerical risk. Given

that the ownership of local stations, networks and

cable news alike is now concentrated in far fewer

hands than it was in the 1970's, such thinking quickly

becomes orthodoxy in much of the American news

business.

 

In the new documentary " Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War

on Journalism, " Robert Greenwald unearths some juicy

documentation of Fox News Channel's manipulations on

behalf of its political agenda. But Fox isn't exactly

pursuing a stealth strategy: anyone who can't figure

out that it's in the tank with the Republican party

must be brain dead. It's more insidious when some of

its more fair-and-balanced competitors blow-dry the

news not to serve an ideology but to tell the public

what they think the public wants to hear. That's why

the networks have been reluctant to show casualties in

Iraq. That's why we rarely see on American TV the

candid video Michael Moore unveils in " Fahrenheit

9/11, " whether of the president or of the grievously

wounded, sometimes embittered soldiers who've returned

from his mission in Iraq.

 

Even now, as the entire press, including The Times,

copes with the reality that it wasn't skeptical enough

about the administration's stated case for war, the

desire to gladhand the public can overcome news

judgment, especially on television. Otherwise

Americans wouldn't have found it such a novelty when

the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish

network, took on Mr. Bush in a TV interview last

month, challenging him repeatedly about the failure to

find weapons of mass destruction and his claim that

the war in Iraq has made us safer. The RTE reporter,

Carole Coleman, wasn't pretending to be any viewer's

family or buddy or lover. " I felt I did my job, " she

said when American journalists questioned her about

her audacity. Maybe so, but next to the Ron Burgundys

in her profession, she seemed less like a visitor from

a different country than an alien from a distant

planet.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company