The breathless news reader announced that after a commercial break, the top story was going to a clip from a sketch comedy show from late Saturday night.
After the medicinal commercials, the news reader was sitting on a couch and engaged in banter with another news reader on the couch talking about a sketch from the Saturday evening show.
The bottom screen crawl announced that this was not only a news program, but a news network.
I was struck by how juvenile we have become in our choice of information sources.
Can one imagine Walter Cronkite sitting on a couch, using network time to talk about a comedy routine? Cronkite held such esteem and projected such gravitas that when he agonizingly came out against the Vietnam war, American opinion turned.
Sure, part of this is about bandwidth and segmentation, after all during Cronkite's tenure, most Americans had three choices for news, and only that in bigger markets. And even with a daily deadline, reporters had time to write, check sources, and film.
As the news cycle has compressed, two of those important steps are missing or truncated. And the American consumer of information has gotten lazy or jaded and all too easily accepts news at face value and all too often passes it along verbatim as news.
Added to that is the fact that much that is passed along is not news. It is usually publicity that confirms a networks biases toward news. Thus a skit that mocks a politician gets coverage, but an academic study that confirms a political stance will get no airplay.
Timing is another issue. The average nightly news piece is 90 seconds or less. Often the teases for this story will accumulate more time than the story itself. Contrast that to a front page newspaper tease for an article. It is often read in seconds, while the article takes minutes to read.
