Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided that it would be a good idea to watch Your World with Neil Cavuto on the FoxNews Channel while on vacation in Seattle. The segment I was most interested in was his interview with Ken Auletta, a contributor to The New Yorker, and author of several books on the business-end of the media profession. I have yet to pick up his latest book, Backstory, but I intend to, after I get back to Minneapolis.
The interview was rather tame and inoffensive, even though Cavuto was obviously trying to stir a big ol’ pile using the cover of an objective interview stick. The professional ticker-tape reading Cavuto is certainly no O’Reilly or Hannity, and he isn’t even a Rivera, but damned if he didn’t try.
As I said, I haven’t read the book yet, but I imagine that Auletta is very critical of Fox News. This is a point that Cavuto refused to let his guest (and more importantly his audience, the precious market share) forget, to the point of repetition that completely destroys his argument. He probably focuses on Fox a little more, but that is largely because FoxNews is the most egregious offender in the cable news arena, in terms of blatantly one-sided coverage. GE’s MSNBC and TimeWarner’s CNN aren’t much better, but with the exception of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, their anchors don’t attempt to appear as the second coming of Christ as they shovel out double-spaced book after book.
It is my belief, and it is certainly true of myself, that many people are critical of FoxNews simply because they make it so easy. Their audacity to market themselves as a viable, unbiased news source while at the same time giving platforms to people with tissue-thin ideological stances is on one hand laughable, and on the other hand completely unacceptable.
In this very entry I’ve illustrated how easy it is to attack FoxNews, as I wasn’t even planning on including the preceding paragraph at all.
The general focus of this piece is actually my take on a point that Cavuto brought up. He gave the impression that he isn’t a fan of hard news or of tragic coverage. Whether or not he only meant that he doesn’t enjoy seeing multi-billion dollar corporations taken into the town square and publicly flogged is a negligible point.
Cavuto used the term that is common to those involved in the theory and practice of journalism. “If it bleeds, it leads” is a term used to refer to the stories involving heinous crimes and/or scandalous events. Things like the Oklahoma City bombing of 1994, the recent earthquake in Bam, Saudi Arabia, and the Scott Peterson trial are all examples of stories which are ran under the banner of the buzz phrase. Smaller stories such as a shooting in a mall parking lot or an arson attack in a neighborhood that one might find on the local news also qualify as stories that lead because they bleed.
Cavuto made a good point that non-journalism savvy people might not make all that often, in that there is more coverage of Michael Jackson than of anything related to the business world. On the one hand, more people are familiar with Michael Jackson via his music or whatever other reason, than there are people who are interested in the mergers and acquisitions information of the week or who are interested in seeing that company X increased its earnings by some amount.
The most important reason that I believe that the technique works, and indeed why I’ve used it in my work, is that the negative effects that celebrities and far-reaching corporations and governments have on the general public will typically far outweigh the good things that they do. Certainly, Kennedy’s spirit put the United States on the moon, but in a single night, Nixon’s cronies destroyed the integrity of the United States political process, something from which we as a nation have yet to recover. For every few points that Wal*Marts and Targets gain, there are Enrons and Halliburtons which swindle their way into the hearts and pocketbooks of America. How did the Internet e-commerce boom of 1999-2001 work out? Just ask the fry jockeys at the Carls Jr. on Market street in San Francisco. Chances are one of them was a CTO.
The shameful moral activities of celebrities and shady business practices of owning-class elites have a greater chance of harming the public than their counterparts have of making the world a better place. As a result, it is important that these negative actions be hammered into the psyches of the public. Ideally, these actions will trigger a call for accountability and proper behavior that will be too loud for the offending parties to ignore, and then we will be able to have a world free of smear campaigns, petty name-calling and wildly off-base accusations.
