The Complicity of the News Cycle

Joe Scarborough says that the news is going to talk about, "[w]hatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive." Well now that he's admitted TV's complicity in the current mess that is the presidential campaign, I thought it would be useful to review how it is that the media got so stupid and reactionary.

If you watch this series of videos from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe you'll learn the whole sad sordid history of TV news. He's talking about the BBC, but he could just as easily be using CBS or NBC as his examples.

In Brooker's discussion there are four eras of news, ending with the current noise machine:

1. Authoritative: In the early days, the news exists to explain the world to its audience and relies on facts.
2. Adversarial: With Watergate, the news exists to expose corruption in high places and relies on confrontation.
3. Sympathetic: The end of the cold war catches the News by surprise. The news loses its sense of good and evil, right and wrong. It is out of touch and elitist. So it goes out in search of authentic experience. Reporters become memoirists living out gritty but staged docu-dramas to show that they understand what life is like for regular people.
4. Self-Referential: The news relies solely on the opinions of the masses. Reporters become pundits and public opinion is the only valid criteria for "truth." News reportage relies on live camera reports that contain no actual information.
   

Which brings us back around to Joe Scarborough who believes it is right and good for the McCain campaign to be dictating the daily news cycle because their opinions are more aggressive, more assertive, and polling better than Obama's.


Here's part 1 of Screenwipe. Part 2 has the most relevant info, but it's good to watch the whole thing.



Part 2

Part 3