Almost all news executives say they want the same thing—news that is new and true and distinctive. Mike Clemente of Fox: “I’m forever telling our reporters . . . what we want is whatever is new and factual. And if we do that, we’ll get more people watching our channel.” Alex Wallace of NBC/MSNBC: “What we want is stories told with unique video that separates us from the mass of video out there.”
So we looked for ’em—stories that were unique and distinctive and new. But comparing what the three American networks and the three cable news channels did on those two days in June with some foreign news channels—Iran’s Press TV, Russia’s RT, Britain’s BBC, and Qatar’s Al Jazeera English—we came away wanting more from America.
There were excellent video reports on each channel (except MSNBC), but few felt unique or even new. There were classics of afflicting the comfortable (ABC’s Jake Tapper on Congress’s exclusive gymnasia); and comforting the afflicted (a terrific CBS piece by David Martin on the military’s lack of programs for wives of returning Afghanistan and Iraq warriors); and two examples of NBC correspondents pushing the envelope—Stephanie Gosk penetrating an anti-American mob in Tripoli and John Ray sneaking across the border into Syria to video the devastated town of Jisr al-Shughour.
But Maria Finoshina’s report on RT, for example, on how selling and buying gas in Tripoli has become a female preoccupation because men in a city under siege had more important things to do, was news to me, and told me something more significant about Tripoli than the presence of angry supporters of Muammar Qaddafi. I also learned new things from RT’s Sean Thomas, who took me to the southernmost Russian Orthodox Church on Earth, in Antarctica, and from Press TV’s Ashraf Shannon’s story of conflict over natural gas in Gaza. During the civil war in the Ivory Coast, France 24 and Al Jazeera English regularly had reporters on the scene. My impression watching the story, confirmed with US officials there, was that no American TV journalists showed up.
Of course, these international channels have an advantage in the “new” department from our point of view, since they frequently address things that Americans know little about. But they often seem to seek out stories a little more imaginatively than their American counterparts. And many of them are mastering video, the world’s emerging lingua franca. Watch news channels like Express 24/7 in Pakistan, Channel NewsAsia in Singapore, or CCTV News or CNC in China and you see channels trying to catch up with the old masters, using the conventions of the trade and the equipment of the moment to create video news made better by what seem to be hordes of reporters and cameras in the field.
Many of the channels resemble their nations. France 24 is very French. It prefers theories to facts and lectures to video packages, but in some otherwise neglected areas of the world, like francophone Africa, they rule the roost. Notwithstanding the reporting triumphs mentioned above, RT, the former Russia Today, is a perfect paradox: its message is unrelentingly anti-American but its presentation is a pathetic parody of American TV—Valley Girl anchors, Barbarella reporters, and a steady diet of reports on American aggression abroad and oppression at home. Press TV of Iran isn’t too fond of the US either, and its lowest-budget, lowest-skill presentation is usually a waste of perfectly good bandwidth. But if you want a peek at Iranian life, where you gonna go?
As a student last year, Bilal Lakhani helped monitor these international channels for the Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism’s “Global Media Wars” project. He told me that after the death of Osama bin Laden he went on Facebook and was surprised to find “lots of people sharing RT and Press TV videos. That’s when I realized that on major turning-point events like Osama’s death, these channels are going to find an audience whose viewpoints align with theirs.”
Columbia’s Ann Cooper started “Global Media Wars” after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified in March before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that, “We are engaged in an information war, and we’re losing that war.”
Marash has been a master story-teller for half a century. This is one of his most important--and most disturbing.
#1 Posted by Jeff Kamen, CJR on Thu 8 Sep 2011 at 02:59 PM
Great work once again David. Your words speak so well of the great experience you have.
#2 Posted by Douglas Vogt, CJR on Thu 8 Sep 2011 at 03:56 PM
David; I was wondering where the industry went.........All the Best, gary
#3 Posted by Gary Shore, CJR on Thu 8 Sep 2011 at 08:59 PM
Dave -
Well done. It is good to know the stories we used to report are still out there! I didn't know watching domestic TV. Thanks.
#4 Posted by James Blue, CJR on Thu 8 Sep 2011 at 11:19 PM
Please please please please please, let us have an analysis, a crude word or lotif count , like the Funk and Wanknalls famous Motif Index by Stith-Thompson, as was done for folk~lore studies. Wanna know if the science of sticking pins in things is very old, look up "sticking pins in things" and you get the ancient antecedents of acupuncture...done in horses hooves to dispel equine devils.
So what would the search words be, or the search visual clues be?
Our very freedom and sentience depends on identifying any and all of the cues, triggers, reinforcements and images so loved bu those wicked evil people that force our next genration, the previous generation and our own with the trappings of MONARCH PROGRAMMIMG. Meinn Gott, notice how much you let your perception allow the following into your male or female gaze, child, adult or teenager:
the colour pink, black and white alternating colours, juddery images, flashy images, hand signs disguising the trappings of power over others that still today create a blind serfdom. Then think of the other colours woven into a hypnotic skeleton for our voting populations in every democracy, the reliance on metals jewels to prompt, suppress or confuse our minds the more we are exposed tov the quicksilver world of video. There is a grammar operating here and it is at our expense, not beck and call. So why this hue and cry? Because video is the technical delivery vehicle for brainwashing, and like nicotine, this delivery system has its defenders and apologists...all victims of the very scheme.
By a quirk of the greatest subtlety I have some leeway to explain this, but the Monarch programming, that is, brainwashing, has passed Go so many times it has a near monopoly when you realise it is silent, unnoticed by the casual viewer, and even allows elements within it to compete with each other to perpetually waste human lives to command the next generation. My father was a piloy fighting the Nazis in World War two. It was a job someone had to do.
I cannot explain to him with Alzheimers why I am taking exception to video, audio and print, never mind my fellow Americans who can no longer be trusted.
(little joke, save that he in his dotage, rememberingthe US as a friend , an ally, is urging me to be nice to the Americans. I long to do that, land of the free, home of the brave, never mind what I found out in 2002 (Tim Baber + Alice in Wonderland Part 1...fast losing its footing in the web . having once been mirrored several times and the British Library archiving it...slowly being starved of the oxygen of life in our world!) But when you consider Monarch Programming now is in speech, print, video and audio like Japanese knotweed in the river at the foot of my garden, we face a variegated butterfly distracting us from thinking and acting for ourselves. Print this out, pass this on , google NSA and :"Sneeze" to see how our most basic expressiveness can be bent to the mast of a pirate ship. Freedom, Thoughts are Free, cry now, for with Monarch Programming you start to cry, underneath, and do not know why. It is your base character or an alter of this mass communications virus of the mind that would have us serfs of....well, let us hope it is no worse than the NSA, but like the film, Things Change, I am not really the man behind the man behind the man absorbing all this stuff, nor do I have, like the British "Liberty" pressure group, the skills or expertise to crush Moionarch Programming as it need to be dispatched or reversed. And if you wanna be looking in the rear view mirror instead of forwards to what is happening now this ancient form of shamanism is projected onto our walls and into our minds, slowly catching our thoughts and substituting rubbish for them, go to "Mengele Forum" and see what artichoke 1986 has said. It is not too late, the NSA need not be the ultimate "man" the "made man" of a video world, a Cool world that is in reality a graveyard of these
#5 Posted by Tim Baber, CJR on Fri 9 Sep 2011 at 02:17 PM
extra bit: ( I ran out of rope )
nor do I have, like the British "Liberty" pressure group, the skills or expertise to crush Moionarch Programming as it need to be dispatched or reversed. And if you wanna be looking in the rear view mirror instead of forwards to what is happening now this ancient form of shamanism is projected onto our walls and into our minds, slowly catching our thoughts and substituting rubbish for them, go to "Mengele Forum" and see what artichoke 1986 has said. It is not too late, the NSA need not be the ultimate "man" the "made man" of a video world, a Cool world that is in reality a graveyard of thesenses. But the alternatives are possibly the same thing, or worse, depends if you are naiive like me, in the sense of Pandora liking havimg an empty box
because she blinked as the goodness flew away.
Tim Baber...Yes, I live on an island, but you do not and may never thanks to the
grasping hand of greed meaning to take evertthing of value from your world.
I am protected by the moat...but my thoughts that travel from here will meet more and more slaves to the baubles that victims of Monarch programming
( and there are a lt of you...a lot of Us I nearly said, suffering in ignorance,
liking the empty boxes because we remember the playing firelds of our youth if we are lucky, we sidestep this , but it is there for our children more than ever. Grrrr
#6 Posted by Tim Baber, CJR on Fri 9 Sep 2011 at 02:26 PM
Just a final note before we all go deaf....9 years ago in 2002 I figured my articles http://khunnamob.hostignition.com/backup/heart7/www.heart7.net/aliceintro.html
nailed the subject for me, now it is worse in the sense of a curve that is exponential. The reason, we have been defeated if this is true:ha ha http://www.whale.to/b/nsa4.html. I have done my research, I remember what it is like to be a child, the story of the little dutch boy with his finger in a whatever the correct term is for a dyke these days. Go to the website, I am a child (Children in art history) and you will find art that actually celebrates Monarch Programming... tantamount to those on Mengele's Forum who cannot see behind Mengele's cap badge.I saw that guy and he tired to kill me, or neutralise me, and it didn't work mate, but I have waited until you must surely be reading this from the sidelines now, where you would have added me to the hundreds of thousands who lost their human rights to your cause. A parent, sensing the battle has been lost, might say, be nice to the Americans, or tuck in behind the strongest. WTF, you tuck in behind the weakest..who knows, our rescue might come from any little boy with a finger in his ears, never mind the dykes , the firewalls that innocence should lend us until we are old enough and wise enough to cloak Monarch Programming with a shroud, and excise the motifs taking us away to the live with the fairies. And that boy needn't be a boy in New Holland, it could be a girl in Belgium, or whoever wins a battle each night by creating their own entertainment. Sure as hell, though, your child is at risk, as you have been and may still believe you have kept the innocence of youth alive this time, one last time, probably. I say this for the record. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they seemed to know stuff happens.
Tim Baber, hero of last night...er, I think, See... I dunno!! My sovereign borders have been crossed and the soveriegnty of my mind been compromised.
#7 Posted by Tim Baber, CJR on Fri 9 Sep 2011 at 02:44 PM
If anything, David is being a little too kind in his observations (he always has been a gentleman). Klein and his counterparts state that intelligent talk can be more informative than crafted video reporting. In theory, that may be true. Unfortunately, in practice it's a different matter. Frequently, the "talk" to be found on television news programs is utter banality. For their next project, perhaps David's team can tally the number of statements per hour that are uninformed, off-point, or just outright silly. I suggest purchasing a calculator that has an exponent function.
#8 Posted by Bryan Myers, CJR on Sun 11 Sep 2011 at 05:25 PM
We are witnessing the effect of smartphones and the proliferation of cameras.
Why bother putting a camera crew on the ground to catch the news when everyone has an HD camera in his or her phone?
When a friend's business recently flooded, I received a call - "check it out on Youtube!" Not on Channel 13. The video was up nearly in real time.
Professional video news is great for planned or predictable events (hurricanes, elections, battles) - but most of what is newsworthy is spontaneous (like the recent earthquake)
Can you imagine the coverage of 9/11 had it occurred today? Or can you imagine CNN spending three hours watching O.J.'s Bronco on the freeway?
People don't expect video coverage on TV - if they want to see the raw video, they'll go online for it. People want condensed information that they perceive to be reliable from somebody they trust.
#9 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Sun 11 Sep 2011 at 09:51 PM
The irony here is so deep as to be painful. As the technology of video and television production has gotten increasingly simpler and cheaper to make, TV networks have run away from it instead of embracing it.
For nearly 25 years, I have been preaching the gospel of the VJ, as well as building TV networks and stations around the world based on this simple principle. Give a reporter a laptop and a camera and show them the door. In many places in the world this concept has been eagerly embraced - it is both less expensive (cutting the cost by as much as 80% and at the same time delivers far more and better material).
At The BBC we took their national network from fielding 64 beta crews a day to cover the country to fielding more than 1000 cameras a day - all in the hands of BBC journalists.
At NY1, which we built in 1990/1!, we put 42 cameras on the street of NY every day, where WCBS, where Mr. Marash was then working, I believe, were fielding 8 crews.
When I started Current TV with Al Gore, we unleashed literally millions of VJs with cameras and let them tell their stories - and still we are only at the beginning of this revolution. Yet, having just had meetings with all of the major networks, I can tell you that they would rather go out of business than embrace this concept. And why?
I think it has to do with the idea that 'real' reporters don't carry cameras, and that, in fact, if anyone can shoot and edit video, then they are no longer so 'special'.
I saw this many years ago when I built Channel 1 in London and Nick Pollard, who later went on to run Sky replaced the small mobile video cameras with Betacams and all the accompanying gear. His reason: "I will not have my people laughed at in the streets".
It didn't look 'professional' to him.
Twenty years later and nothing has changed.
#10 Posted by Michael Rosenblum, CJR on Sun 25 Sep 2011 at 05:10 PM
Here's a much more complete response
http://www.nyvs.com/blog/user/michael/As-Video-Gets-Easier-To-Make-TV-Network-News-Runs-From-It
#11 Posted by Michael Rosenblum, CJR on Mon 26 Sep 2011 at 09:09 AM
The news of today is brought to us, for the most part, by people who have no real clue of what they are covering. There knowledge of, or understanding of a "story" is apparently no longer relevant, or of much import. So your last paragraph is indeed most telling.
"And veracity and authority, where will that come from? Old recollections and unsourced pictures? If a tree falls in the forest and all you’ve got is file footage and some guy who once was a lumberjack, the sound produced is likely to be bad news."
A timely and necessary article, even if unsettling.
Thank you
#12 Posted by Eric Mondschein, CJR on Sun 13 Nov 2011 at 09:19 PM
David, everything you say is true, and right on point.... and the loss of accurate news coverage and journalsim may spell the downfall of America and it's democracy...
#13 Posted by Skip Brown, CJR on Mon 14 Nov 2011 at 09:57 AM
What Mr Rosenblum really set out to do is, I suspect, to eliminate the cost of a cameraman and soundperson. Why pay three people if you only have to pay one? And, If you can also lower the standard of what people accept for video reports, you can use cell phones, and eliminate those expensive broadcast news rigs. As a veteran freelance network news and news magazine cameraman for the past 30 years, for what it's worth, here's my opinion of the dumbing down of broadcast video news gathering.
The VJ, contrary to the romantic image proposed by Mr Rosenblum, is typically a young, poorly trained, poorly paid, poorly treated neophyte with a poorly maintained pro-sumer camera. The claim that they are freed up by the small camera and laptop editing software to be better reporters is dubious at best. Wearing all three hats, producer, photographer, and editor, and being under the same deadline pressure as three or even two person crew is a prescription for journalistic sloppiness, not to mention a nervous breakdown. During the last election cycle, i came upon a young women working for ABC as a VJ, shivering, and sobbing on the back porch of a VFW Hall in New Hampshire. It was freezing and a cold drizzle was falling and I asked her if there was something wrong and could I help? She then related to me that she was sick with the flu, had been sent out on the road non-stop for weeks with her pro-sumer video camera, instructed to roll on every single second the candidate was campaigning, from dawn till night, then upon arriving at her motel room each night, to transfer the footage to her laptop. She then had to log it and send it to New York, every night. She was lucky if she got two hours of sleep and her boyfriend, fed up with the jobs demands on their relationship, had just broken up with her. From my observations, this is more typical of the VJ that the networks and cable news channels are replacing experienced camera crews with. Does anyone think thats the new improved method of covering stories? My education as a photojournalist occurred both directly and, in my opinion more importantly through osmosis. Graduate school on the one hand, and working with experienced news directors, producers, correspondents and even those old pro sound guys was something that added immeasurably to my journalistic skills and seasoning. The VJ of today is thrown into the shark tank with very little support, training, or future.
I couldn't help but wonder as I watched the repeated airing of the cell phone videos showing Penn State students overturning the television news van if there could be a more apt image to represent the dumbing down of video news gathering and also, did those same cell phone VJs participate to any degree in the rioting before they recorded it? I know that would never have crossed my mind if a CNN camera crew shot it.
#14 Posted by Frank Konesky, CJR on Mon 14 Nov 2011 at 02:57 PM
Thanks Dave
#15 Posted by Tom Murphy, CJR on Wed 16 Nov 2011 at 02:50 AM
Video is a fantastic tool to show people around the world what is going on--good, bad and ugly or beautiful. But writing about it thoroughly is also a necessity for those in the future to know what happened. Later some may not have access to the video but they can find the report or essay about it and even later look further for video or pictures that illustrate what they read. It still is too true that one remembers more what he reads and writes about than what he just hears or sees. Use them both but don't change to video only. Words still mean a lot.
#16 Posted by trish, CJR on Sun 20 Nov 2011 at 11:16 PM
I hate CNN.
#17 Posted by Custos, CJR on Sun 5 Feb 2012 at 07:02 PM