4 November 2014
Written in the style of U.S. News and World Report
Ted Turner is the root of all evil. The eccentric media mogul was a household name when I was growing up in Atlanta, long before the Braves baseball stadium bore his moniker and long before the Braves were a team worth mentioning. But Turner saw their worth, and he purchased the team so he could broadcast all their games on his TBS television station. He turned TBS into the first super-station, broadcasting content nationwide via satellite, and his next media venture would change the world as we know it: 24-hour news.
The monster he created has two heads, the first of which is “infotainment.” Coined in the 80’s as CNN was cutting its teeth, the portmanteau describes “a television program that presents information (as news) in a manner intended to be entertaining.”1 Cable news is driven by advertising revenue, which encourages networks to keep viewers
from changing the channel. CNN and the cable news networks that followed tore down the historical walls between the news division and the entertainment division, the public services and the money-makers. Soft news and human interest stories now drown out more important but less marketable issues in the continual ratings battle.
Fierce competition and sensational headlines are far from new. The term “yellow journalism” originated in the 1890s, referring to the contest between the New York Journal and the New York World newspapers.2 William Randolph Hearst’s supposed quote about the Spanish American War—“You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”—sounds like something you might hear in a cable newsroom today. But the damage newspapers caused to the American discourse pales in comparison to the influence of television media on a nonstop loop.
The second head of Ted Turner’s beast is the 24-hour news cycle. According to reporter John Kiesewetter in 2000:
“CNN has changed news. Before CNN, events were reported in two cycles, for morning and evening newspapers and newscasts. Now news knows no cycle. When a plane has crashed, or shots are fired in school, we expect to see it immediately on all-news channels. We don’t depend on the Big Three broadcast networks.”3
A news cycle so relentless allows precious little time for reflection and reasoned discourse. Accuracy and journalistic standards take a back seat to breaking news and keeping stories fresh. Embedded investigative reporting doesn’t have nearly the profit margin of a handful of pundits around a table.
The media’s dual role in politics is to allow politicians to communicate with the public while allowing the public to hold politicians accountable. In the toxic environment of 24-hour news and infotainment, these purposes become perverted. Fox News structures its narrative so that it fulfills the first objective for Republicans and the second for Democrats, and to a certain extent MSNBC does the opposite. Scandals receive higher ratings than policy debates, and pundits who yell loudest receive the last word. When Turner predicted CNN would be “the greatest achievement in the history of journalism,”4 did he also foresee its impact on democracy?
1 http://www.merriam‐webster.com/dictionary/infotainment
2 http://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_journalism.html
3 http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2000/05/28/loc_kiesewetter.html
4 http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts‐culture/cnn
Lauren B. Lentini 