I was going to say something rueful about the
latest fine example of "storytelling" to grip our cable-led, corn-fed tabloid news media. Something like: when it's not missing
pretty white women, it's dead little white girls. And then I spotted the byline and I did something unusual: I actually read the damn thing.
This got me thinking. Not of psycho killers and Midwestern Gothic small towns, but off the bloody mess that is the news industry's mad race to the bottom.
More below...
I read the story because I grew up within spitting distance of
Zion, Ill., an odd little town founded by religious zealots and dominated by the
most mismanaged nuclear reactor this side of Three Mile Island (happily, put out of commission by Clinton's NRC). I didn't learn much, but I read it anyway, because I could find Zion on a map, even after all these years among the heathen coastal elites, and out of a vague sense of concern for the rugrats of kin and friends in the area.
So I was reading this, and reading Atrios linking to another howl from the wilderness of the tabloid backlash, and mulling the myopia of all the big national news organizations chasing the story like so many drooling, camera-wielding zombies, and thinking that it bothers me that stories like this could be of interest to a national audience. Who wants to read about dead little girls? Not I, and were it not for the local connection, I would have gladly skipped over it.
I suspect I'm not alone, and that this is a major problem with CNN's new "strategy," i.e., "What Fox and MSNBC said." CNN's braintrust seems to believe they can win back market share by flagging up bloody or otherwise titillating human interest stories of the sort that used to be considered local stories. For the sake of my flagging optimism about human nature, I hope they're wrong, and so far, they seem to be. The sort of incremental ratings gains they're boasting to analysts about suggest they're still playing defense, and poorly, while Fox eats their lunch and saunters away with the girl like the bully in those old Charles Atlas ads, leaving them with nothing but a nasty fist-induced tummy ache. Klein is shitting himself, trying to look busy, babbling happy-talk and hoping some act of grace falls out of the sky before the bigs at AOLTimeWarnerTurnerWBHBONewLine & Etc. notice. Luckily, they've so far been too busy with their violin lessons to notice Atlanta burning.
But this got me thinking: What if CNN or MSNBC were to devolve into a network of regional news-gathering operations, running these sort of local stories in regional markets where people might actually reasonably give a shit? What if they backed that up with a consolidated national and international news operation that didn't have to spend all its time chasing hurricanes or missing white women? What if they actually used their muscle in Atlanta to report on pocketbook issues and matters of national concern and left the tabloid trash to regional offices in Milwaukee or Chicago?
Well, for one thing, they'd be taking on the local TV affiliates while maximizing their natural advantage of not being tethered to the Atomic Age news cycle. For another thing, they could probably do it with minimal added investment, and while I'm not familiar with the structure of their advertising rates, I'm pretty sure that slicing the pie thinner would provide another means of bringing in big advertisers.
But of course, it'd never fly, because the name of the game throughout the news media these days is figuring out how to capture Fox News' unattainable million or so hardcore viewers, not delivering a superior product to the broadest possible audience.