It's clear that, if there's a story which truly shocks, then people will leap to the TVs and the ratings will skyrocket. Ted Turner earned a lot of dimes with this basic rule of TV ratings.
But these profitable blips are clearly windfallish in nature. Randolph Hearst may have proved to have a raw talent in "making news," but this clearly can't be put into a managment textbook in a communicable way: his flair cannot be passed along through business school.
So any promotion-seeking executive would have to come up with some substitute because they know that the shock-and-huddle makes for better ratings.
What better way than by using a clique of reporters with an us-against-America attitude? Or a bunch of hysterics making much ado about ephemera? Or people that combine both?
The anti-Vietnam bias in the late 1960s got ratings. For all we know, the inspiration for the confrontational mode was far less Ramparts than Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In - a show with 40+ ratings.
As far as their wooden-headedness is concerned, another durable source of ratings is a fan base. Narcissistic arrogance, as displayed in verbal behaviour, actually leads to such a journalist being idolized and even worshipped. This implies (counterintuitively) that a queen bee - whose style of interviewing essentially is "see thing my way or all you'll hear is 'when did you stop beating your wife'" - makes strategic sense as a hire.
The fact is that extreme liberalism and moderate anti-Americanism is an optimal choice for a television reporter. The average American will be induced to watch regularly, because of the mild shocks administered and (quite possibly) the hunger-for-seeing-notoreity factor, which will raise news ratings higher than they otherwise would have been.
The fact is that liberalism of the New Dork type in television journalism seems to be as conducive to a successful corporation as don't-offend-anyone Republicanism is in the regular kind of big corporation.
"What's bad for America is good for the media - and Vice Versa!"
The home video of the arrest of Rodney King made sensational news. But the entire tape, as commentated on by defense lawyers, shows behavior on the part of Mr. King which--the first Sgt. Stacy Koon jury held--explained the behavior of the police sufficently to make the police not criminally liable for what Mr. King endured. But the interesting fact is that the videotape made even more sensational news after editing than it did initially--for the very understandable reason that all portions of the tape having any bearing on the reason for the police behavior were edited out.
Endlessly rebroadcasting the remainder of that tape is exactly what I would have done if I had wanted to see a riot in Los Angeles. That is exactly what broadcast journalism did after the initial Stacy Koon verdict of "Not Guilty" came down. Not only so, but reporters broadcast interviews of the "No justice, No peace" activists. And to top it off broadcasters reported, in real time, where looting without police interference was ocurring.
In sum, if journalists had any other thought than to exacerbate the situation and cause the nation to watch in horrified fascination, they had a remarkably strange way of showing it. And were I a business owner who had been burned out in that riot, I would have wanted to sue the broadcasters for their very underwear.