Dumbing It Down And Tarting It Up Aaron Brown’s departure from CNN is the latest fundamental shift in U.S. broadcast news November 23rd 2005 01:01am | Posted by: Robert Falconer HNR Senior Editor By Robert Falconer | HNR Senior Editor The Google news alert arrived to my email inbox during the wee hours of November 3; Aaron Brown, the veteran anchor of CNN’s NewsNight, had, after just shy of four years, been unceremoniously dumped by the network to make way for demographic favorite and all ‘round wunderkind, Anderson Cooper. It was a disappointing finale for the onetime star of CNN’s primetime news broadcast. The news was personally disappointing for me as well. I had been granted permission by CNN to interview Mr. Brown only a few weeks earlier, and was relishing the tough questions:   “How do you respond to those who say the journalism profession has morphed into a ‘media industry’ owned by conglomerates?” “How do you see CNN regaining ground in its ratings battle with Fox News?” “Were you surprised that Chicago won the World Series?” Yet there it was in a “You’ve Got Mail” instant—the subject of my interview had himself been struck out and retired from the team mid-season, seemingly a victim of one of the very issues I’d hoped to discuss. Truthfully, the news had not come as a complete surprise; the sword of Damocles had been hanging precipitously above Brown for several months. While Anderson Cooper quickly established his reputation as a “go-to” journalist – a man apparently dedicated enough to interview an atomic bomb five minutes before detonation if called upon – right wing bloggers had been frothing on the Internet about Brown’s perceived “liberal” news slant and “dreary delivery.” Trenchantly defending Bill O’Reilly’s rancorous Talking Points on FOX News, these extremists characterized a growing demographic that has ultimately seen the “Fair and Balanced” News Channel consistently defeat CNN’s ratings since the beginning of the Iraq War. Though Brown's overall 10 p.m. average of 842,000 viewers had been far from the weakest cog in CNN’s programming machine, it nevertheless trailed Fox’s competing On the Record With Greta Van Susteren at near 1.8 million viewers. Cooper, his rising popularity solidified by both his own 360 program and his coverage of Hurricane Katrina, was therefore added to NewsNight in a bid to bolster the network’s overall ratings. CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein hastily described the sudden pairing of Brown and Cooper as "fire and ice." A Bumpy NewsNight For those who remember the 1950 film, All About Eve, the awkward coupling of Brown and Cooper felt more like Margo Channing and Eve Harrington, with the young, up-and-coming understudy looking to replace the veteran performer. Brown in particular seemed squirmy, off his game, and despite the large audience the two garnered during September’s ubiquitous hurricane coverage, despite flashy new graphics and rotating video cubes and chewing the set, the “dynamic duo,” as Larry King had jokingly referred to them, was unable to hold onto the audience and received mixed reviews. On October 28th, Brown gave his last broadcast on NewsNight with no hint of finality or fanfare, save a prophetic throwaway comment at the very end about being on holiday the following week. Reportedly, he and Klein had discussed other, reduced roles at the network; those talks, not surprisingly, ended at an impasse. To anyone watching those final two weeks of NewsNight, it was glaringly apparent that Brown was already being pointed toward the bone yard. CNN believed Anderson Cooper in the 10 p.m. timeslot was the future. The decision was part of a systemic revamping of the network in its effort to challenge Fox News’ ratings supremacy. It also underscored the latest transformation in America’s broadcast news landscape, one shifting from analytical reporting to talk/tabloid. Show Us The Money The corollary between Brown’s dismissal and the changing face of American broadcast news was glaring. And while Aaron Brown had lost his job and I had lost an interview, it occurred to me that American viewers had lost something far more important—the institution of the experienced, sober, inscrutable news anchor, perhaps most famously epitomized by CBS’ Walter Cronkite, and in recent years by Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings. Now that these legends of broadcast media were gone, the audience was left to navigate the shark-invested waters of opinionated cable columnists. So how did we get to this point? The short answer is, money. It would be naïve to assert that television news media has ever been completely free the shackles of corporate influence or advertising sponsorship. Edward R. Murrow’s dogged criticism of Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts during the mid-1950s led Alcoa to very nearly withdraw its advertising dollars from CBS. But that was a conflict of interest, where money was potentially a collateral victim of an ideological battle, rather than a root cause in itself. In recent years, increased corporate ownership of the news media, along with vertical integration, have given rise to the belief that news departments should effectively become cost centers—responsible for paying their own way with little or no subsidization from other divisions within the parent company. Ideally – so the theory goes – they should be revenue generators. And as any neophyte television viewer knows, high ratings = advertising dollars. Of course, the best way to achieve high ratings is to “entertain” your audience, irrespective of whether or not they are necessarily being “informed.” Enter Fox News Network. Molded under the watchful eye of conservative media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, the emergence of Fox News in the late 1980s heralded a whole new archetype for television “journalism.” Murdoch surveyed America’s broadcast news landscape, determined what was missing, and put together an entertaining cocktail of left-wing opinion, fiery rhetoric and cheeky irreverence designed to appeal to America’s disenfranchised anti-“elite.” Almost overnight, the God, guns and apple pie crowd felt validated; perhaps even one step closer to conservative hegemony. Fox President Roger Ailes recently claimed on The Charlie Rose Show that what makes Fox different is not that it espouses a political philosophy but that "we don't eliminate anybody's point of view," implying that the conservative viewpoint is omitted or banned on other networks. More likely, viewers see the Fox formula as strangely compelling, akin to staring at a train wreck. Either way, it slowly began to trickle ratings away from the once formidable CNN. And it’s a trend that has increased dramatically, and successfully, in recent years, as Fox News rolls out a growing army of venomous commentators led by the outrageous Bill O’Reilly. The Oh Really Factor (aka, Let’s Blow Stuff Up) Fox’s Bill O’Reilly may be about as popular in liberal quarters as Hugo Chavez at a 700 Club fundraiser, but the 2.7 million viewers The O’Reilly Factor pulls in daily are hard to ignore, and shockingly demonstrate how vitriol oozing from the studio walls can be so compelling to so many Americans. It’s not his conservative leanings, per say—nothing wrong with that in and of itself. It’s the hyperbolic statements and full-on inflammatory assaults that are viewed as so broadly reprehensible. Yet by their very nature they automatically foster controversy, and controversy equates to ratings. The most egregious example of O’Reilly’s outrageous viewpoints came on November 8, when he angrily responded to San Francisco voters who had “dared” to ban handgun ownership along with aggressive military recruiting in their high schools. O’Reilly leapt onto his soapbox and offered the fine citizens of the city by the bay some free advice: “You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium and I say, ‘Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds.’ “Fine. You want to be your own country?” he continued. “Go right ahead. And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.” Whether O’Reilly – who holds a degree in History from Marist College, a Master's in Broadcast Journalism from Boston University and another Master's Degree in Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government – was truly inviting al Qaeda to blow up the Coit Tower, or indeed that he believes any of the rhetoric that he proselytizes, is open to debate. Perhaps O’Reilly believes that if wars and Hollywood movies can draw viewers with pyrotechnics, blowing up a national monument can do the same thing. One thing is certain: he’s a consummate showman, and his show is the tent pole of Fox News. Dumbing It Down And Tarting It Up And so CNN has responded to Fox News’ ratings dominance by employing a strategy that fights fire with flash and pious moralizing with sensationalist fluff. The first example was Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, the set festooned with floor to ceiling monitors and fancy graphics that look like they came straight out of the mind of one of Ubisoft’s Rainbox Six video game designers (Tom Clancy would be proud). But it begs the question: does mesmerizing a gawping demographic weaned on video games really contribute in any meaningful way to their understanding of the issues that form the core of the story? Splashy graphics aside, what about the stories themselves? Anderson Cooper 360 immediately began mixing “hard news” with tabloid tripe, i.e. just last week an important story concerning the Iraq War was immediately followed by a vacuous piece about a woman who allegedly takes pictures of one’s aura with a special camera. Hmm. The worst part is that after Cooper had his picture taken by the woman, he never even bothered to ask her if the equipment itself might be producing the effect “in camera”—a simple enough trick for anyone who knows anything about photography…or more importantly, cares enough about journalism to ask. In its misguided attempt to clone Fox’s ratings success, CNN appears to be fast losing its credibility as it trots out ever more empty-headed programming. Perhaps the most egregious example of its headlong rush towards journalistic entropy was the hiring of former prosecutor Nancy Grace, whose unbearable histrionics and obsession with society’s scum and villainy seem better suited to six months of therapy than a primetime “news” program. Veteran CBS News anchor Dan Rather has voiced serious concerns about this new form of 24-hour news tabloid, with its competitive, rush-to-report style and insatiable appetite for sordid depravity. As he described it, it “has led to a dumbing-down, a tarting-up, a sleazing-up of news” on TV and has, in short, “lowered standards.” No one expects the news to be a magnum opus, just a balanced, up-to-date report of the day’s top stories with some critical examination of why it should be important to the average person. By straying from its original formula, CNN may be playing a zero-sum game in the hopes of effectuating a significant ratings gain against Fox News. Final Thoughts Certainly Aaron Brown’s NewsNight was not without its problems, and his avuncular, fireside gravitas was not for everyone. On the Oct. 22 episode of Saturday Night Live, Darrell Hammond parodied Aaron Brown and NewsNight. At the beginning of the skit he turned to the camera and said, “I'm Aaron Brown, and - how can I put this - I'm better than you.” Regardless of one’s opinion about Brown’s style of delivery, NewsNight was the one program in CNN’s lineup that not only reported the news, but also analyzed it from both sides and attempted to objectively place it within the greater context of an evolving world. There’s nothing wrong with Anderson Cooper, per say, yet as one viewer perceptively remarked, “Cooper feels, but Brown thinks.” It’s time for “thinking” journalism to return to cable news.   At the end of the day, the people will determine what plays. Aaron Brown may have summed it up best when he said, “Television is the ultimate democracy; viewers vote with their remote controls.” Interestingly, Anderson Cooper’s ratings have been falling since Brown’s departure. For the week ended Nov. 13, Anderson Cooper 360 averaged 593,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. That’s down 27 percent from October's 813,000 average for NewsNight, on which Cooper and Brown shared hosting responsibilities, and well below the 842,000 Brown’s show averaged during 2004. It looks like the votes are in. Meanwhile, don’t be surprised to see Brown show up to fill the news anchor shoes at either CBS or ABC. Rumor has it he may be in talks with one or both networks. And if such a thing should come to pass, perhaps that fundamental shift in U.S. broadcast news will – god willing – slow just a little. Source: HNR In: Editorials |Visit the HNR Forums

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