I have Ranted about this before, and I am going to Rant about it again.
News and entertainment usually don't make for a healthy mix.
One foot in news, one foot out, does not make for a good broadcast.
I watch CBS for my news, whether it is the local WCBS-TV news or the national news via the CBS Evening News.
In recent months, both have tread on this news/entertainment fence, and I believe that by doing so, they have fallen flat on their faces.
The local CBS outlet here, Channel 2, treads this line each and every day, and it really takes away from their local news shows.
Leading up to David Letterman's retirement from his late night show, they ran months and months of highlights of his show during the newscast.
Yes, when there were major fires to talk about, people murdered, heaven knows what else, here they were running basically promos leading up to Letterman's last show.
No, it is not news when he has 47 shows to go, nor is it when he has 10 shows to go.
But to blatantly be shilling for their own late night entertainment program ... well, I think that Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite are probably turning in their graves over this.
And it did not end with Letterman's final show, the only show of the last 47 that could be considered news, since he was on that program for decades.
They promoed the late late night James Corden show incessantly, and now are doing the same with the new Stephen Colbert show--so much so, in fact, that they have news people starring in commercials pushing the show.
And of course they also do this with football, where not only do the over-talk about it on the local newscasts to push their coverage of the games, but they also have newscasters featured in commercials trumping these broadcasts.
The night of the day that the news reporters were murdered by a crazed gunman, the local CBS newscasters here spoke at great length about their coverage of a pre-season football game to the point that I had to check the calendar to make sure they weren't talking about the Super Bowl.
And the Evening News isn't immune to this either.
If you remember a few years back, Katie Couric was raked over the coals for bringing too much Hollywood glitz to the Evening News while she was its anchor.
They get rid of her, brought in Scott Pelley, and evidently, the remnants of Couric must still be there, because they also tread a little too much on the news/entertainment line.
For instance, they have also had news about Letterman's finale, and also have had "football-emphasized" stories to trumpet the network's football coverage.
Bah!
There is no reason not to cover an entertainment story if it IS actually news. A major entertainment death, some notable entertainment figure does something that has major impact on all of us, or even a spectacular movie opening can ALL be news, to a certain level.
However, when you are mixing entertainment and news to trumpet your own entertainment programming, you are kind of going over the line.
The "happy talk" news era was done and over with more than 30 years ago. Why bring it back now?
I think the latest situation has to do with the Internet.
More and more people are getting their news straight from this electronic medium, and not from TV anymore. They haven't gotten their news from radio or newspapers in eons.
So the TV newscasts have to do something drastic to hold their viewers, and that is why they spend less time talking about real news items and more time talking about entertainment stories.
It grabs the viewer a bit more hearing about Brad Pitt's newest crusade--heard on the Evening News a few weeks back--than it does hearing about the latest murder or house fire.
And that is a said state of affairs; it really is.
Entertainment Tonight has become the news, and the news has become Entertainment Tonight.
It just isn't right.
And it isn't just on CBS news shows. I have sampled other local and national news shows, and they all do it, to one extent or another.
Kind of shameful, if you ask me.
You might say that I am old fashioned, but honestly, when I watch the news, I want to hear about the news, not about some celebrity losing part of their outfit to the night and showing too much skin to the world, a world that by my estimation, doesn't really care about such stuff.
We live in a complex world today; why is a "nip slip" news?
"Infotainment" - sadly, they all do it. I feel less "talked down to" by Lester Holt on NBC. Between a hard copy of the New York Times and e-mail updates from The Guardian and The Washington Post, I pretty much feel as though I'm getting at least most of the real picture.
ReplyDeleteIt just shouldn't be that hard to get to the real story.
- Country Paul
There is such a thin line between news and entertainment today, and I think that this is being propelled by the networks, who are losing viewers to the Internet and are trying to reel them back in by doing puff pieces heralding the networks' new shows, including Colbert and football. It isn't right for them to be shilling, and then the very next story do something on a human tragedy. It simply does not work for me.
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