From what we see on network and cable news shows every day, and from the robust media criticism on the Internets, much of us suspect that kowtowing to power, either for access to powerful politicians or because that's what powerful media corporate owners expect of their employees, has become the default position of national TV news.
And it's not just Fox; they're just way more obvious about it.
For example, NBC is owned by General Electric -- one of the most openly Republican major corporations (remember Jack Welch's interference in the newsroom on behalf of Bush on Election Day 2000) -- and GE has definitely affected what stories were broadcast by NBC's signature hour-long news show, "Dateline."
That's what former "Dateline" correspondent John Hockenberry charges in a remarkable essay in MIT's Technology Review (Hockenberry is now a research fellow at MIT's Media Lab.)
Gory details on how GE/NBC suits mess with their journalists, below.
After devoting his career to network TV news, Hockenberry is shocked that MIT students "have no interest in or even knowledge of traditional networks. ... It has given me some hard-won wisdom about the future of journalism, but it is still a mystery to me why television news remains so dissatisfying, so superficial, and so irrelevant."
Well, some of the stories Hockenberry tells help solve that mystery.
Here a good one to start with:
(During the "shock and awe" bombardment of Baghdad), most of the Western press had evacuated, but a small contingent remained to report on the crumbling Iraqi regime. ... Producer Geoff Stephens and I had done a phone interview with a reporter in Baghdad who was experiencing the bombing firsthand. We also had a series of still photos of life in the city. The only communication with Baghdad in those early days was by satellite phone. Still pictures were sent back over the few operating data links.
Our story arranged pictures of people coping with the bombing into a slide show, accompanied by the voice of Melinda Liu, a Newsweek reporter describing, over the phone, the harrowing experience of remaining in Baghdad. The outcome of the invasion was still in doubt. There was fear in the reporter's voice and on the faces of the people in the pictures. The four-minute piece was meant to be the kind of package that would run at the end of an hour of war coverage. Such montages were often used as "enders," to break up the segments of anchors talking live to field reporters at the White House or the Pentagon, or retired generals who were paid to stand on in-studio maps and provide analysis of what was happening.
snip
At the conclusion of the screening, there were a few suggestions for tightening here and clarification there. Finally, an NBC/GE executive responsible for "standards" shook his head and wondered about the tone in the reporter's voice. "Doesn't it seem like she has a point of view here?" he asked.
There was silence in the screening room. It made me want to twitch, until I spoke up. I was on to something but uncertain I wasn't about to be handed my own head. "Point of view? What exactly do you mean by point of view?" I asked. "That war is bad? Is that the point of view that you are detecting here?"
The story never aired.
snip
Perhaps it was never aired because it contradicted the story NBC was telling. At NBC that night, war was, in fact, not bad. My remark actually seemed to have made the point for the "standards" person. Empathy for the civilians did not fit into the narrative of shock and awe.
Right after 9/11, Hockenberry got some rare face time with Jeff Zucker, a major GE/NBC suit, to discuss what "Dateline" should work on, now that things had changed forever.
Hockenberry pitched a series of stories about al-Qaeda, arguing that most Americans knew nothing about the terrorist group that had just attacked us; Zucker wanted "a series of specials on firehouses where we just ride along with our cameras, like the show 'Cops,' only with firefighters," which GE/NBC evidently thought was closer to the "emotional center" of the "Dateline" audience.
A few weeks later, a half-dozen producers were assigned to find firehouses and produce long-form documentaries about America's rediscovered heroes. Perhaps two of these programs ever aired; the whole project was shelved very soon after it started. Producers discovered that unlike September 11, most days featured no massive terrorist attacks that sent thousands of firefighters to their trucks and hundreds to tragic, heroic deaths. On most days nothing happened in firehouses whatsoever.
Then there was the time Hockenberry got his hands on video of some Connecticut prison guards restraining a mentally ill prisoner so severely that they killed him.
This kind of gruesome video was rare. We also had footage of raw and moving interviews with this and another victim's relatives. The story had the added relevance that one of the state prison officials had been hired as a consultant to the prison authority in Iraq as the Abu Ghraib debacle was unfolding.
There didn't seem to be much doubt about either the newsworthiness or the topicality of the story. Yet at the conclusion of the screening, the senior producer shook his head as though the story had missed the mark widely.
"These inmates aren't necessarily sympathetic to our audience," he said.
The fact that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was unimportant. Worse, he said that as he watched the video of the dying inmate, it didn't seem as if anything was wrong.
"Except that the inmate died," I offered.
"But that's not what it looks like. All you can see is his feet."
"With all those guards on top of him."
"Sure, but he just looks like he's being restrained."
"But," I pleaded, "the man died. That's just a fact. The prison guards shot this footage, and I don't think their idea was to get it on Dateline."
"Look," the producer said sharply, "in an era when most of our audience has seen the Rodney King video, where you can clearly see someone being beaten, this just doesn't hold up."
"Rodney King wasn't a prisoner," I appealed. "He didn't die, and this mentally ill inmate is not auditioning to be the next Rodney King. These are the actual pictures of his death."
"You don't understand our audience."
"I'm not trying to understand our audience," I said. I was getting pretty heated at this point -- always a bad idea. "I'm doing a story on the abuse of mentally ill inmates in Connecticut."
"You don't get it," he said, shaking his head.
The story aired many months later, at less than its original length, between stories that apparently reflected a better understanding of the audience.
And, here's some key background to the death of NBC correspondent David Bloom in Iraq that I did not know about before:
As the nation geared up for the invasion of Iraq back in 2002 and 2003, NBC seemed little concerned with straightforward questions about policy, preparedness, and consequences. It was always, on some level, driven by the unstated theme of 9/11 payback, and by the search for the emotional center of the coming conflict. From the inside, NBC's priority seemed to be finding -- and making sure the cameras were aimed directly at -- the September 11 firefighters of the coming Iraq invasion: the soldiers. To be certain, the story of the troops was newsworthy, but as subsequent events would reveal, focusing on it so single-mindedly obscured other important stories.
In 2002 and 2003, NBC spent enormous amounts of time and money converting an Army M88 tank recovery vehicle into an armored, mobile, motion-stabilized battlefield production studio. The so-called Bloom-mobile, named for NBC correspondent David Bloom, brought a local, Live-at-5, "This is London" quality to armed conflict.
Using a microwave signal, the new vehicle beamed pictures of Bloom, who was embedded with the Third Infantry Division, from the Iraqi battlefield to an NBC crew a few miles behind, which in turn retransmitted to feed via satellite to New York, all in real time. While other embeds had to report battlefield activities, assemble a dispatch, and then transport it to a feed point at the rear of the troop formation, Bloom could file stories that were completely live and mostly clear. He became a compelling TV surrogate for all the soldiers, and demand for his "live shots" was constant.
But Bloom's success in conveying to the viewing audience the visual (and emotional) experiences of the advancing troops also meant that he was tethered to his microwave transmitter and limited in his ability to get a bigger picture of the early fight. Tragically, Bloom died of a deep-vein blood clot (my note -- which is often caused by sitting for long periods of time in a confined space).
The expensive Bloom-mobile remote transmitter eventually came home and spent time ghoulishly on display outside 30 Rockefeller Center. It was used once or twice to cover hurricanes in the fall of 2004, to little success, and was eventually mothballed. The loss of one of NBC's most talented journalists was folded into the larger emotional narrative of the war and became a way of conveying, by implication, NBC's own casualty count in the war effort.
Here's something else I didn't know:
Entertainment actually drove selection of news stories. Since "Dateline" was the lead-in to the hit series "Law & Order" on Friday nights, it was understood that on Fridays we did crime.
Hockenberry tells other fascinating stories, evidently just as he worked in long-form TV news before, now he does long-form written journalism.
His story about how GE suits tried to foist the Six Sigma manufacturing improvement system on a news division is hilarious, and not just for the surprise, and apt, Maoist reference. He also provides snarky insight into the "To Catch a Predator" stunt that is basically all that is left of "Dateline."
And he writes a good deal about how GE/NBC simply does not get the new technologies that transmit news and information, in fact, he thinks he was "marginalized" and eventually laid off in part because of his work on live Internet audio and video webcasts.
It seems to me the larger part of why Hockenberry lost his job is that he wanted to do it too well, and the GE/NBC suits preferred to do news cheaper and more in tune with the way Karl Rove wanted networks to behave.
Please, go read the whole thing -- there's so much I left out, including the GPS-guided exploding confetti canisters of empathy that he starts this remarkable essay with.