By Brigitte L. Nacos
If you really want to know what's wrong with television and the talking heads of shows that pretend to be about public affairs, just take a look at the way the TV-networks and local stations as well hyped the arrest of the self-confessed killer of JonBenet Ramsay, the miniture beauty queen. After getting plenty of mileage out of this case in the last decade, the questionable confession of a publicity seeking man became the most durable "breaking news" of the week. Obviously, those "deciding what's the news," to refer to the title of Herbert Gans's excellent book, recognized the new hook into the old case as having more potential to lift ratings than the current and far more relevant news from Iraq and elsewhere. In fact, the elite print press, too, kept the story alive. Thus, on Saturday the Washington Post carried a JonBenet story on its front page.
To be sure, the confession of a possible killer should be reported. But to devote whole programs to this material or devote a great amount of airtime and space to this material and place it prominently in lead stories and on front pages reveals the priorities of today's newsrooms, where good judgment seems to have given way to profit imperatives that are driven by ratings and circulation.
As I surfed TV channels a few minutes after ten p.m. Thursday night in search of one news or infotainment program that was not featuring this story, I did not find a single one. Four local channels featured the case at the top of their ten o'clock newscasts as did "Prime Time" on ABC News. On MSNBC, Dan Abrams pontificated about this breaking news from a studio, while Greta van Susteren ("The Point") on Fox News did the same from the murder site in Boulder, Colorado--just as she had anchored her show a few days earlier with London's Heathrow airport as backdrop. Worse yet, with Anderson Cooper probably still in the suddenly forgotten Middle East, his program on CNN was anchored by a guest host in order to fully focus on JonBenet's possible killer. Finally, on CNN's Headline News a stand-in for Nancy Grace massages the last drop of non-information out of her guests.
Desperate to find domestic and international news, I switched to the BBC World News channel--but only for a short moment and till the anchor in London brought in BBC's correspondent in New York who reported on America's most important story: you guessed it--the murderer of JonBenet.
This uniformed offering may tell us just as much about news/infortainment consumers as about those who decide what news we get and how that news is presented. But with so many channels presenting the same, one wonders, why none of the newsroom bosses breaks the mold and tries to attract viewers and listeners who otherwise turn off their TV-sets.
And by the way, Friday night's prime time offering on cable TV was pretty much the same...
i belive whoever did this to this beautiful young girl has to be very sick!!!!!!!!!! who in the world can do something so terrible and still be walking i feel the perosn responsible for this murder is afraid and is a punk they cant face up to stupid actiond
Posted by: Bootz | May 28, 2007 at 09:07 AM