Laci who?

In October, I went with my friend Katherine to a couple of events as part of The New Yorker Festival.  One was a panel discussion with the three network news anchors, "From Where We Sit:  the Campaign and the Network News."

After about an hour of moderated conversation by the New Yorker's media critic Ken Auletta, they allowed questions from the audience.  I knew this would be my chance to vent some of my frustration with the mainstream media, so I hurried up to one of the microphones to ask a question.  I didn't know it at the time, but C-SPAN was filming the event (my mom was flipping through and saw me the next day).  I also got a call a few days later from my old co-worker Jennie in Sacramento and then from my friend Adam's brother Alex in Cincinnati, both of whom had sworn they had heard my voice on the radio.  Sure enough, the NPR show Fresh Air played portions of the panel, which you can listen to here (to get to my question, fast-forward to minute 31:30).   
 
Here's what I asked:

"You all have spoken very eloquently this morning about your frustration with only having 18 or 22 minutes every night to report the serious issues - and everyone agrees that there are very serious issues affecting our world, and affecting, you know, our country  - so I wanted to hear kind of a justification from you about why you feel the need to cover the Kobe Bryant trial, the Scott Peterson trial, and I wanted to hear a defense of how that impacts my life and the public good."

Peter Jennings of ABC News refuted the question:

"I didn't cover the Laci Peterson 'thing' on our broadcast at all...I think we did only two pieces on the entire Kobe Bryant trial on World New Tonight."

Dodging the question, Tom Brokaw of NBC News spoke about the emergence of blogs, saying:

"it is a democratization of information, and frankly I think that's very healthy for our society."

I thought that only Dan Rather of CBS News honestly tackled the question:

"If I understand the core of this question, the answer is yes, taken as a whole, there's more reporting about celebrities, reporting about entertainment, people, trends - this is, what I have called in another context, the 'Hollywoodization of the News,' [this has] been a dangerous trend and continues to be...this undertow has developed, once news operations, particularly the major network news operations, became a profit center, it was inevitable that these pressures begin to work...it's a real and present danger that you succomb to...it's very hard to resist that each and every time."

Well lo and behold, today I came across the following story from none other than Peter Jenning's "we didn't cover Laci Peterson" network: "ABC News Original Report: Why We Were Infatuated With the Peterson Case."  Brilliant, Peter, absolutely brilliant.  You krazy Kanadian, you sure know a lot of about journalistic integrity and what's really important for people to know about in today's complex world.  

Comments

[Teresa]

What's strange is that it isn't just "celebrity-type" stories (ie: Laci or Kobe)that are sensationalized. I have a problem with the Hollywoodization of the real news. The fact that CNN has to come up with an appropriately menacing theme song whenever they report on "The War on Terror". It seems like even important news is slicked up for entertainment value.

Don't know if you saw last week's South Park - but the kids were working on their school's closed circut TV news show. They realized they had to jazz up their news broadcast to compete with another student's show, so they called their show "South Park Sexy Action News!" and it had an explosion as part of their logo. Cartman told Token to stop his "ebonics tribe-speak" and sound more "how should I put this? White." so that he'd be palatable to the audience. They made up stories and scandals, and got higher ratings...

Shame that this was funny because it's true....

[Forest]

Yo, B-Dog,
Where u at? What's with not posting for two weeks?!?!
Love
F-Bomb

[Pat]

Walsh,
Where's the love? You planning on putting something new up? I used to depend on you for entertainment during class in the middle of the day. You're letting me down.

[H. Dao]

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