For being as young as it is, all-news television has been through a lot of changes, most of them for the worse.
Cable News Network — CNN — went on the air 45 years ago last month. It grew fairly quickly, and by 1990 it had surpassed the ABC broadcast network as the leader in breaking news coverage. There was some competition early on. Satellite News Channel, based in Connecticut, had big plans when it started, but it burned up on entry, in part because half the hour was devoted to local coverage and cable providers weren’t interested in the trouble and expense of acquiring local news. A year and a half after it hit cable it was gone. Its programming reminded me of NBC’s “NIS” — News and Information Service — an excellent idea for all-news radio that came and went in 18 months in the mid 1970s.
Never utterly unbiased, CNN’s leftward slide accelerated in the 1990s, whereupon something called Fox News Channel appeared with the since-abandoned slogan “Fair and Balanced.” Its growth got a shot of steroids with the Bill Clinton Oval Office adultery-and-cigar scandal, which led to a nightly 6 p.m. show called “Special Report,” anchored by the unsurpassed Brit Hume. Its Sunday news discussion program was moderated by the late Tony Snow, a great reporter. Being a News Corp product, it did carry the tabloid stench, a contagious infection it turns out.
There followed various politically based “news” networks. Just as the innovation of cheaply made Compact Discs flooded the market with terrible music and created a roar of background noise that made the discovery of good music more trouble than it was worth, the internet made it easy and relatively cheap to make your own television “channel.” People now call their YouTube accounts “channels.” I have one (or had; it’s been more than a decade since I logged on to it).
Shortly before Fox News Channel went on the air, a weird marriage of Microsoft Corporation and NBC rolled out as MSNBC. MSNBC was a sort of news channel at first. It gradually became a left-wing lunatic asylum and is now to the left as professional wrestling is to the Trumpists: some of its most fervent fans probably think it’s real, but it’s largely watched for entertainment.
Which isn’t to say that Trump-based broadcasting is devoid of its lunatic fringe. The Fox News Channel has gone from being decently unbiased to a mix of flibbertigibbet blond rage during the day and Trumpian punk rabies at night. Where once there was the decent “Hannity and Colmes” program, balanced and demonstrating nightly that lefty Alan Colmes was an order of magnitude brighter than the handsome-but-dim Sean Hannity, there is now just Hannity, proof that the loudest Trump supporters are as stupid as you think they are. He is preceded by the professional jerk Jesse Watters and, before him, the once sensible Laura Ingraham is now reduced to the role of geriatric cheerleader (for Trump of course). Hannity is followed by a show that is said to be funny, but it’s at least on purpose.
Most of the rest of what has become Fox Trump Channel stands as evidence that news personalities are chosen on looks alone (as well as what might be a deliberate effort to lend credence to every blond joke you ever heard). The one authoritative program the channel still has is “The Journal Editorial Report” for an hour on Saturday afternoon. (The most recent Fox show to disappear into the vasty deep of Trumpitude is “Special Report,” the last of the channel’s untainted daily shows.)
CNN, meanwhile, has become simply unpleasant. Yes, it has its leftward tilt as always, but its attitude has worsened. Relatively little of it involves actual news; instead, it’s a peculiar diversity-on-parade format, like the BBC. I do not know if it’s actual programming policy for their “talent” to appear to be as old-looking, angry, and one-sided as possible, or if it just turned out that way. As noted elsewhere, CNN has become, apparently on purpose, the channel for those who seriously thought and still think that Kamala Harris would have been a fine president, while Fox Trump Channel is for those who worship the guy who defeated her. (MSNBC is for those who think that Al Sharpton deserves a television show.)
For some time now, ever since I switched entirely to my home-made televisions, Timothy R. Butler has sung the praises to me of the NewsNation network. Last week through a combination of jiggery-pokery and animal sacrifice (don’t worry — they had it coming) I was finally able to get NewsNation to stream into my home. And after a week’s viewing I can say that I agree with Tim that NewsNation isn’t governed entirely by political bias.
But it’s still not good at news coverage. If it is your source of news, you’re not getting the news as you’re likely to define it.
Sprung from the Chicago television station WGN (for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” when its associated radio station was started by the Chicago Tribune in 1924), and through various machinations, sales, partnerships, and so on over the years, NewsNation hit the wires and dishes four years ago. It is a free basic channel on many streaming and cable services. It does its news streaming 24 hours per day, though like Fox some of the overnight programming is repeats of earlier shows.
It interested me even before Tim mentioned it because it features a number of people who were at Fox when that channel was still largely reputable. Chief among them in my mind is Chris Stirewalt, who used to be Fox’s polling and elections numbers cruncher. He was fired by Fox for calling Arizona for Biden in 2020 (because Biden had won Arizona), which marked the point at which Fox ceased to be a news organization. Stirewalt suggests it was earlier. (I highly recommend his telling of it, at the link.) He was raised, as was I, as once were all good reporters, on the now-anachronistic notion that you report the facts even if you don’t like them.
“Major players in the news business are abusing their privileges and shirking their duties, and we all pay the price,” wrote Stirewalt nearly three years ago. “The agenda at many outlets is to move away from even aspirational fairness and balance and toward shared anger and the powerful emotional connections it can create.” He was right then and the situation has grown worse, which NewsNation markets itself as having countered.
There are some other new channel retreads there, which is not a criticism. Chris Cuomo is one. He was run out of CNN for advising his brother Andrew, at the time the governor of New York (and last month loser to a communist for the Democrats’ nomination for mayor of New York City), on how to respond to the scandals that ran Andrew out of public office. He is still a kind of unctuous character, but that may be genetic, and on NewsNation he’s not as bad as he was on CNN. There is former-MSNBC, former-CNN, former-CourtTV personality Ashleigh Banfield, who runs a tabloid crime-and-courts show nightly. (Women on NewsNation tend to unconventionally spell their first names.) Bill O’Reilly, canned by Fox eight years ago and now primarily seen as replacement tub-thumper for a patent sleep aid, is lurking in the NewsNation wings, but now he just seems old. There are a few brought over from Fox Business Channel (which became the second Fox channel wholly supplicated to Trump following last year’s election, when Neil Cavuto left). There are a lot of commentators from The Hill, a Washington political publication, and the 6 p.m. program, opposite Fox’s “Special Report,” is called “The Hill.”
A leading problem is that the “newscasters” were chosen for reasons other than competence, at all three networks. They were chosen as television personalities. The result is unimpressive everywhere. I suppose “personality news” makes money, but it doesn’t deliver the news very well. And NewsNation, like Fox “News,” is afflicted with the rot of tabloidism.
So facts promptly and accurately stated is not really the goal. For instance, on Saturday night, a NewsNation anchoress announced that a “fireball,” of which there was striking video, had possibly “fallen off a meteor.” No, it was a meteor. Not to be outdone, on Monday afternoon the Fox anchoress-personality spoke of illegal aliens having been “bused to El Salvador.” Those who were sent to El Salvador were, as shown on her own channel over and over, taken by airplane. In his Sunday-night personality program, the Fox morning show sidekick — he began there as the sports announcer — Brian Kilmeade talked about the B-2 bombers that flew to Iran from Montana. They flew from Missouri, but hey, they both begin with “m” so close enough for personality news.
NewsNation has a little feature — I’ve seen it a time or two — in which it supposedly delivers the news in 90 seconds. But it doesn’t do that; it is 90 seconds of oddities, chiefly mined from “social” media.
They’ve all given up coverage of the daily Russian massacres of civilians in Ukraine — doesn’t market well, I guess, and with Trump’s fickle nature it is difficult to decide which side to be on, a problem that wouldn’t exist if they covered the news.
While the other two channels feature one side shouting its nonsense with token representation from the other side, NewsNation has both sides arguing in lieu of actual coverage of what’s going on. The unhappy fact is that they are all sports stations, and the sport they cover is politics. The news doesn’t enter into it, and on the occasions when it to cover non-politics news, NewsNation falls short.
Let me offer an example from Sunday night.
There were several tense and unhappy hours Sunday afternoon and evening near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Fire fighters were summoned to a brush fire. When they arrived, someone shot at them, killing two and badly injuring another. Law enforcement came round in substantial number, and after a while the shooter blew himself away.
I learned about it from the TwitteX list that reports breaking news at once. CNN covered it fairly quickly. Fox Trump Channel came lumbering along in a bit, though its video coverage comprised a couple of boxes showing video of God knows what, with a red-and-white cartoon globe spinning in the background. In due course NewsNation heard about it and sort of covered it, though it was at least a half hour late with any details. (They were first, though, in getting an opinion about it from a Tennessee congressman. I guess the rationale was that both Tennessee and Idaho have trees and bumpkins.)
It got worse. When the bad guy sent himself to wherever he’ll spend eternity, CNN had the news within a half hour of its appearance on the TwitteX list. Fox was not far behind. Though it kept its “Breaking News” and “Live” graphics on throughout, NewsNation kept reporting that the gun battle was still going throughout the evening (it did interrupt the Idaho coverage to go on for a while about the trial of the “artist” formerly known as Puff Daddy, which has fascinated all three networks if not the country at large). It looked as if NewsNation was replaying its earlier Idaho coverage, which is dangerous to do when there’s breaking news. It finally switched, well after midnight, to a replay of its 6 p.m. newscast — from the previous Friday! Meanwhile, the Idaho sheriff had held a news conference and brought up-to-date anyone who cared, which would mean CNN’s viewers and, to a lesser extent, those watching Fox, who joined it in progress. Those networks carried it live for real. I hope the people of Coeur d’Alene weren’t watching NewsNation, or they would have been cowering in their homes until sometime Monday. (None of the three has done any follow-up coverage, so it was more like television coverage of car chases, popular in California: The exciting chase is broadcast, but the offenses involved and the outcomes of the cases are never disclosed.)
NewsNation isn’t at its best when it comes to actual breaking news. Neither is Fox. CNN is the best of the three at breaking news, as long as you ignore the “analysis.” NewsNation was in this case egregiously awful.
It’s only marginally related, but while I’m here I’ll mention an offense of which all the networks are guilty, not just Sunday but pretty much always.
The killed and injured fire fighters were constantly referred to as “heroes.” They might well have been, but there’s nothing from Sunday that suggests it. They responded to a call of a brushfire, not a brushfire-with-a-guy-shooting. If they’d been told that part, they would have said that once the cops dealt with the guy doing the shooting, they’d be happy to come round and put out the fire, but they’ll stay at the firehouse until then. I know and have known many firemen, some extremely brave, and not one of them was or is an idiot willing to die over a small brushfire. The Idaho firemen were murder victims.
Likewise the ridiculous “in harm’s way,” which was poetic the first time it was uttered (possibly by John Paul Jones in 1778) but which has been beaten into a pulpy, meaningless cliche by politicians and television “news” personalities in the last couple of decades. News reporters should not use it unless they want to sound like the windy melodrama actors which, come to think of it, many of them are. A serious reporter would say “in danger” instead.
Don’t get me started on “first responders.”
Fortunately, on Monday I discovered a way to get C-SPAN on my home-brew teevees. That is likely to reduce the time I spend watching any of the channels mentioned above, because with C-SPAN I don’t need to endure the words of asses later translated by monkeys. Or, as some would have it, the remarks of honorable elected officials reported by television personalities. [*]
It’s not to everyone’s taste, but a substantial group of humans who are free to roam the earth like to collect stuff. Some focus their collections — stamps, coins — but others of us are not prejudiced. We collect anything that is interesting.
There’s been a lot of news lately, as you might have noticed. You might, too, have noticed that getting actual, accurate news coverage seems all but impossible.
One of the things I find most appealing about the Japanese anime art form is that you often hear characters encourage others by saying “Do your best!” Or characters who have been worried recover their courage and with renewed resolve lift a fist into the air and declare, “I’ll do my best!” Some of us remember when you didn’t need to watch a cartoon from overseas to find that sentiment expressed. In fact, it wasn’t all that long ago when it was expected of each of us, all the time. No longer.
There is so much we could discuss, practically all of it obvious and troubling.
When I walked into the newsroom of The Athens News, nearly 19 years ago, the first thing I noticed was the clocks.
Get ready for the onslaught of stories and advertisements from people you probably shouldn’t trust, subject: prostate cancer.
It might be possible, please hear me out, that there is some aspect of the new Pope, Leo XIV, more important than whether he roots for the Cubs or the White Sox, as needful of divine intervention as those two teams tend to be.
Nowadays it is difficult to get a grasp on what we could reasonably call reality. Okay, fine, I’ll play. If that building on falsehood is not to my taste, I’ll start with what I know is real and work from there. I’m talking about photography. Of real things as they really exist.
This is likely a week we will remember as the beginning of something truly awful. The only question, really, is how awful.