Posted on 01/30/2006 9:52:58 PM PST by Happygal
Ted Koppel kicked off his neo-pundit career by delivering a stern global warming speech in New York while outside a merciless snowstorm bore down on the Eastern Seaboard in a brutal blast of freezing --
Oh, wait -- that was Al Gore, wasn’t it?
I tend to get all these neo-pundits mixed up.
Mr. Koppel’s post-Nightline era more correctly began with a January 29 Op-Ed in the New York Times which is actually quite similar to Mr. Gore’s address both in fervent presentation and excruciatingly bad timing. Which may explain my confusion.
Ted, likely grateful to now be immersed in an activity which does not beg relentless jokes about his hair, opines, “I cannot help but see that the industry in which I have spent my entire adult life is in decline and in distress,” which is certainly observant of him, and probably precisely what op-eds read like in those final, excruciating days of Horse and Buggy Monthly.
Very few could argue that Ted’s industry -- network television news -- is descending as fast as elevators do in crazy slasher movies, and we grant that he is most certainly correct in his observation. It is in pinpointing exactly what the heck is going wrong that Mr. Koppel strays into the delusional:
“Most television news programs are ... designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences,” Ted writes. “That may be not only acceptable but unavoidable in entertainment; in news, however, it is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important, not the other way around.”
Hark! Is that the distant crack of the buggy whip?
Why, yes, I believe it is. Get along, Thunder!
It is the journalists who should be telling their viewers what is important?
This statement is notable for its arrogance right out of the barn, of course, but arrogance is probably the oldest news in the news biz. Ted’s statement is rather more notable for what it says about the network journalists who appear to have somehow missed the Big Story -- the somewhat-obvious information revolution occasioned by the rise of the Internet, and its fatal body-blow to the idea that it is the journalist who is the arbiter of what’s “important” on Planet Earth.
As a journalist myself, I can say with some certainty that this contention amounts to a particularly ripe horse and buggy emmision.
First of all, it is common knowledge to everyone but journalists that journalists are among the most goofy, self-important, ill-mannered and neurotic individuals extant. Journalists should, in fact have a Dysfunctional Hall of Fame, but there’s not enough room for it on the continent.
No one with any sense at all wakes up one day and decides, “I want to get my information -- especially the life-or-death stuff! -- from that guy over there, the one with the wall of awards from malajusted people who think just like him, three failed marriages, and, oh yeah, the drinking problem.”
But that’s pretty much the deal Ted’s got going here. I am certainly not insinuating that Mr. Koppel himself has a problem with the bottle. Ted used to work way too late for that, for starters, industriously interviewing Nightline guests -- often with the back of his head. It was his fellow network journalists who were just getting started around Ted Time, gathering at Ship of Fools with other network journalists to talk about how horribly tough network journalism is and how come nobody seems to be listening to them anymore, anyway?
The answer to that plaintive question is, of course, that since approximately the turn of the century, network journalists have been toiling in the electronic equivalent of the Superior Buggy Axle Emporium, circa 1935. Technology running roughshod over them, these diehards metaphorically labor to get the goddamn brass cotter pins just right while stridently complaining about the engine noise leaking in from the street.
What network journalists uncannily missed, or more likely fearfully ignored, was the explosion going on out there in cyberspace. Suddenly, no one with Internet access and a functioning brain really needed Ted -- or Dan, or Tom -- to tell them what was going on. Hundreds of thousands of news sources were now available, and the days when the network news divisions (aided by a quick scan of the New York Times, of course) could decide what defined news, when news was presented, and who presented news were emphatically done. It wasn’t just a whole new ballgame, it was a whole new league.
Ted’s news generation, conversely, spent most of its existence as boxed-in as Wheaties. Network journalists usually had a half-hour format, minus commercials, to impart what they considered “important.” When Walter Cronkite ended his nightly newscast with, “That’s the way it is,” he was more correctly saying, “That’s the way we decided today what was newsworthy and then worked like fire ants on meth to cram it into the preceding broadcast. How’d we do?”
To his considerable credit, Ted and his Nightline helped break the mold by devoting an entire half-hour or hour-long program to a single topic, but it was still Ted and his associates who chose the topic, selected the guests, set the agenda. Crammed.
Decided what was “important.”
It is that corporate stranglehold on “importance” which is what has been broken by the new media, and it is, er, very informative that Mr. Koppel seems to think that reestablishing the Establishment is the key to saving the industry he has so recently departed -- in no small measure because he was swarmed under by this radical “people thinking for themselves” thing.
To illustrate, let us picture a “strategy session” at the Superior Buggy Axle Emporium, circa 1935, which emerges with a business plan involving the use of somewhat better wood.
Just to show how completely he simply doesn’t get it at all, Koppel further comments that network news divisions may not only be failing because of millions of actual people deciding what is important to them rather than relying on Ted to figure that out, they also are tanking because their offerings are aimed at 18-to-34 year olds who are “a relatively narrow and apparently uninterested demographic.”
He advises it might be better to skew to the oldsters.
This is like saying your buggy axle factory is failing because you’re not doing a good enough job selling buggy axles to Chrysler owners. Cyberspace to Ted: The 18-to-34 year-olds aren’t disinterested in news, they’re disinterested in you -- or Brian Williams or, for God’s sake, Bob Schieffer -- telling them what the news is. They’re getting plenty of news, all they can handle, actually. They’re just getting it on another screen, one which allows them to determine for themselves what is “important.”
As clueless as it is, Ted’s Times op-ed is exceedingly useful in defining the mindset of the 21st century Journalism Establishment, which is just as hard-headed as the political cabal which journalists like the young Ted Koppel railed against back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Like the obstinate, dark-suited denizens of that other Establishment, older generation journos have frantically circled their buggies to protect the dwindling provisions left to them, only to find themselves in a circular firing squad.
That Mr. Koppel can argue with a straight face that it is better in 2006 for journalists to decide what curious people need to know, than it is for curious people to dig out on their own what they need to know is not only a terminally self-important notion, it is also antiquated beyond belief. Like Al Gore before him, Ted is making his arguments surrounded by a storm everyone but him can see.
About the Writer: Lin Anderson is a Nevada writer/editor and the National Association of Free Community Papers’ 2002 winner for best original writing. A frequent contributor to Nevada magazine, he has won five Nevada State Press Awards and in 2001 was inducted into the Nevada Broadcasters Hall of Fame. You may visit his web-blog at http://www.rabbitbrush.com/lin. Lin receives e-mail at lindanderson@hotmail.com.
Hope you don't mind!
Yer quick, you are!
Hi guys, haven't been around for a while...but I think this one is worth reading!!
Ping yer ping lists.
When I'm impressed. I'm impressed!
Who cares about the article!!!
I finally got pinged by HappyGal after all these many months!
Read the friggin' article, I'm off to me leaba (bed! *LOL*)
Good to see you too toots!
:-)
Ha!
Make that 'ha-ha', he likes plenty of 'wiggle room'!
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Ted Koppel
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No biggie, he was a noob...
LOL!
Hmmmm. I know two journalists on this thread.... At least one is a chain smoker with an attitude. :-)
The other needs to update his blogsite!
From http://www.rabbitbrush.com/lin/
LATEST UPDATE 8.03.05
Very nice article and couldn't agree more!
Well at least we have proof that he can at least count to 2,000
Haven't watched or listened to the turd since
TT
Well written.
You sayin' I got attitude? *LOL*
You BETTER believe it! haha! :-) Gotta dash, late for work!
I've seen too many stories about the tragic case of some unfortunate omitting the fact that the unfortunate might have caused his or her bad situation. At the end of every one of those unfortunate-victim stories, the alphabet journalist would ask or imply what the government was going to do for the poor unfortunate. I wanted to scream at my tv, "tell the poor unfortunate to quit whining and get a job!!!
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