tyndall report posts
http://tyndallreport.com/
Volodymyr The CharismaticVolodymyr The Charismatic
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5790
Andrew Tyndall2022-04-07T09:58:13-08:00
News coverage of the War in Ukraine -- specifically Zelensky's leadership of the resistance against Russia's invasion -- has overturned all normal patterns of journalistic response. March 2022, the first full month of war reporting since the invasion of the final week of February, was one for the record books.
Normal expectations are that wars are always more newsworthy in America when American lives are at risk: Iraq or Afghanistan more newsworthy than Syria or Bosnia. Beyond that, perceiving a lack of audience interest in international turmoil, the television networks have scaled back their commitment to foreign bureaus remorselessly over the past three decades.
Statistics from Tyndall Report's 35-year database of coverage on the broadcast networks' weekday nightly newscasts (ABC, CBS and NBC combined) tell the story: in the late 1980s, they averaged an annual total of 3,600-or-so minutes filed from foreign datelines; by the late 2010s that average was down to around 1,200.
The decade-long civil war in Syria is the most vivid example of the mainstream media's decision to turn foreign carnage, even of the most extreme and gut-wrenching kind, into an afterthought. Persistent Russian-backed atrocities against civilian populations attracted ever diminishing returns. Now Russia commits those same atrocities in Ukraine and editorial decision-making is turned on its head. The first full month of the Ukraine War received more attention than the single heaviest entire year of coverage of the Syrian Civil War (562 minutes in March 2022 vs 461 for all twelve months of 2012)
But it is not just Syria. Last month in Ukraine attracted more attention than the heaviest single month of coverage of the war in Bosnia (272 minutes in December 1985) and just as much as the heaviest Kosovo month (565 minutes in April 1999). The difference between the intensity of the coverage of the two Yugoslav wars was NATO's involvement: the alliance committed its air power over Serbia during the Kosovo conflict; Ukraine was just as heavily covered even as NATO's planes stayed on the ground. As for other wars where American troops were involved, the first full month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was more heavily covered than the heaviest month for three American invasions: Panama (240 minutes in December1989), Somalia (423 minutes in December 1992), Afghanistan (306 minutes in November 2001).
Astonishingly, the two peak months of coverage of the Iraq War each saw less saturated coverage than last month in Ukraine (414 minutes in March of 2003 and 455 minutes in April). Needless to say, that datapoint arises not because the attack on Saddam Hussein's Baath Regime was treated as less newsworthy. It was because Donald Rumsfeld's shock-&-awe conquest was speedy and successful, unlike Vladimir Putin's. Which brings us back to the argument that all this coverage is Zelensky's accomplishment. It was under his leadership that Putin's shock-&-awe was stymied.
The only three months of war coverage in the last 35 years that have been more intensive than last month in Ukraine were Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 (1,208 minutes) and his subsequent removal in January and February 1991 (1,177 and 1,033 minutes respectively).
It is a demonstration of Zelensky's perceived newsworthiness that both ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News decided to assign their anchors to an extended interview with him, despite the fact that he would not be speaking English, meaning that the audio would consist of the stilted tones of a simultaneous translator. ABC's David Muir aired a ten-minute q-&-a with Zelenky on March 7th; NBC's Lester Holt had five minutes on March 16th, the very day that Zelensky's remote video address to a joint session of Congress led all three evening newscasts.
It is not that the networks find Ukraine intrinsically fascination. During 2014, when the pro-Kremlin regime was ousted by Kyiv's Maidan protests and Putin responded with annexation of Crimea and trench warfare in Donbas, the networks spent 392 minutes on Ukraine over the entire twelve months. To repeat: just the single month of March saw 562 minutes. Again we return to the argument that this saturation coverage is Zelensky's accomplishment, a television-savvy leader who played the part before he was elected to it.
In addition to those personal appearances by Zelensky by remote feed, the overall structure of the coverage has been Kyiv-based. That is partly from the necessity that Putin's draconian censorship laws against calling the war by its name have all-but prevented its coverage from the Moscow angle. Yet, more unusual for the American news media, there has been precious little coverage from Washington. Apart from Zelensky's address to Congress, the Ukraine War was covered from inside-the-Beltway only a handful of times during March: CBS and NBC three times each from the White House; CBS' David Martin three times from the Pentagon; and once from NBC's State Department veteran Andrea Mitchell.
Note that none of these inside-the-Beltway reports was filed on ABC. For ABC's newscast, especially, Kyiv has been the focus of attention -- yet symbolically so, rather than concretely. ABC has not actually delivered more on-the-ground battlefield reporting from the capital than the other two newscasts. Instead, it organizes its war reporting so that a compendium of the day's video highlights from all theaters is narrated from there by its flak-jacketed correspondents. These narrated segments can run as long as five minutes at the start of the newscast. First Ian Pannell, then James Longman: they are tantamount to playing the role of sub-anchors rather than reporters in the field.
CBS and NBC, by contrast, have tried to push their war correspondents closer to the frontlines, filing reports that tend to be more vivid yet more anecdotal than ABC's, less of the day's overview. CBS started the month with Charlie d'Agata in Kyiv and Christopher Livesay along the southern Black Sea front; later Syria veteran Holly Williams arrived to cover the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northern outskirts of Kyiv. NBC's Iraq veteran Richard Engel led its frontline coverage from Kyiv before heading to the eastern front around Kharkiv, while Molly Hunter filed from Odessa in the south.
Needless to say, it was too dangerous for any correspondent to be based at the epicenter of March's carnage, the bombarded city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. All three newscasts had to rely on pooled footage of its razing and its massacres, supplying voiceover narration and gathering the firsthand accounts of those fleeing residents who managed to escape alive.
Away from the frontlines, there was a second major strand of March's Ukraine coverage. Zelensky can also take credit for the prominence of this second strand, if only indirectly. Normally in a war in which the United States is not involved, it would be the default position of the American news media to search for a fair-and-balanced way to present both sides of the conflict. It is to Zelensky's credit that, this time, the networks had no problem seeing the conflict from his point of view.
The force of his moral clarity and charismatic outrage made the (accurate) decision easy to make: that Ukraine represented heroic resistance, Russia barbaric aggression. A corollary of thus taking sides was seen in that second strand of the story, the mass exodus of refugees from the warzone, covered both from Lviv, away from the frontlines, in western Ukraine and at the border with Poland.
For this reporting, both ABC, with Matt Gutman, and NBC, with first Tom Llamas and later Gabe Gutierrez, deployed domestic-based rather than foreign correspondents. In other words, the plight of these refugees represented, for these networks, a crisis that did not require international expertise.
Again, this is a radical departure from the networks' standard procedure. Normally, refugees are a seen-from-both-sides problem: desperate Syrians, or Haitians, or Central Americans clamoring at a border for humanitarian relief -- and immigration officials at checkpoints guarding against an untrammeled influx that might overwhelm the host country. In this case, for the networks, just as much as there was no doubt that the government in Kyiv was mounting a righteous resistance, there was no doubt that these refugees, mostly woman and children and the elderly, were on a righteous "unarmed road of flight" as the bard puts it.
Nowhere was this endorsement more emphatic than when all three newscasts brought out the biggest and most traditional reportorial device in their toolkit: Big Foot Journalism. It is a guaranteed sign of both commitment to a story and a moral certainty about how it should be framed when the newscasts spend the time and money -- and take the extra security precautions -- to jet the news anchors themselves into the scene of the story.
ABC sent David Muir to the border of Polish border with Ukraine on two visits for a total of five newscasts during March. NBC sent Lester Holt to Lviv for three newscasts and later to Poland after covering Joe Biden's attendance at the NATO Summit in Brussels. CBS sent Norah O'Donnell to Poland for two newscasts. And on each visit, the anchors focused not on the war but on the refugee crisis that the war created -- although O'Donnell did fit in an inspection of a Patriot missile battery too.
It turns out that the high-profile long-form presidential interviews that Muir and Holt conducted with Zelensky were aberrations from the modern image that the networks have of the role of their figureheads. Remember their predecessors from three decades ago: Dan Rather famously donned mujahedeen garb with the fighters in the Hindu Kush; Tom Brokaw attended the breach of the Berlin Wall and rode his bicycle with a hidden camera around Tiananmen Square; Peter Jennings famously established his global bona fides by displaying encyclopedic knowledge at Opening Ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games.
Rather than rubbing shoulders and debating geopolitics with heads of state like the Voice Of God anchors who came before them, today's anchors -- we can see it from the way they are portrayed by their own networks' publicity and promotion -- are characterized by their empathy, their common touch, their ability to see the world through the concerns of everyman. Jennings may have been a precursor here, when he decided to cover the Siege of Sarajevo from a hilltop through the eyes of a war-weary 13-year-old boy.
Nowadays bonding is the name of the game. ABC's America Strong participants routinely give a shoutout to "David" for his understanding of their struggles. NBC's Inspiring America allows Lester to lift up his viewers' spirits. Norah routinely gives us a pep talk about service or loyalty or family or friendship after watching one of CBS' human interest features. What better way for these anchors to display their true touch with our common humanity than to greet wartorn Ukrainian refugees as they head for European safety? What better way then to kneel to comfort the weeping toddler clutching its last remaining cuddly toy?
So, again, let's give the charismatic Zelensky credit for inspiring these Big Feet to jet across an ocean to show their sympathy for Ukrainian refugees when those from other warzones have rarely had such solicitude bestowed on them (an exception being a trip by David Muir to the Bekaa Valley in September 2014). Let's give Zelensky credit. Otherwise we might be forced to focus on the difference between the blue eyes and blond hair of these tiny refugees and those refused entry in the camps along the Rio Grande.
And to insinuate that such an ethnic difference would be the explanation for the contrast in the way the networks treated their respective plights would be invidious.]]>Afghanistan Has Not Been Covered As America's Longest WarAfghanistan Has Not Been Covered As America's Longest War
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5789
Andrew Tyndall2021-08-19T06:40:39-08:00
But that is not the message that the actual coverage of the conflict in Afghanistan has delivered over the two decades since 2001.
The network nightly newscasts have not been on a war footing in their coverage of Afghanistan since 2014: for the last seven years they have treated the role of the military there as an afterthought, essentially a routine exercise in training and support, generating little excitement, no noticeable jeopardy and few headlines.
This withdrawal of war correspondents from the field was compounded by a virtual void in diplomatic coverage last year. When negotiations by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020 reached the current commitment to end the US military role in Afghanistan, the three broadcast networks devoted a grand total of five minutes to the promise to bring America's so-called longest war to an historic end.
Five minutes! Such were the demands on the news agenda of the looming coronavirus pandemic in the early spring of 2020. Coverage of all other developments was eclipsed by COVID. The networks had long since given up covering the war as a war. The pandemic meant that they barely paid attention to the prospect of peace.
Before the ignominious throwaway represented by the virtual non-coverage of the Doha talks, the US military deployment in Afghanistan was covered in four distinct phases by the broadcast networks' nightly newscasts (all data here represent minutes of coverage on the weekday nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC since 2001).
Only two of those four phases can be considered to be war coverage proper. Thus for the majority of the twenty years, Afghanistan has been treated as a low-intensity non-newsworthy military deployment, rather than as war itself.
Phase One was war indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. Phase Two, stretching from 2003 through 2008, saw Afghanistan presented as a sideshow, overwhelmed by the larger and deadlier invasion of Iraq. Phase Three saw a revival of war coverage, marking then-President Barack Obama's so-called surge of military deployment, peaking in 2009 -- when total coverage actually surpassed 2002 -- and lasting until the surge was drawn down in 2014. Phase Four, from 2015 through 2019, saw the networks withdraw their reporting resources to accompany the Pentagon's drawdown of its surge. The minimal coverage in 2020 marked the almost complete obliteration of Afghanistan from the networks' agenda, drowned out by the tidal wave of coronavirus coverage.
Here are the averages: annual war coverage during Phase One was 638 minutes (CBS in the lead with 281 mins vs ABC 188, NBC 170). During Phase Two, when Iraq dominated, annual war coverage was 82 minutes (NBC 34, ABC 27, CBS 21). CBS led the revival in coverage for Phase Three, Obama's surge: the annual average for those five years was 270 minutes (CBS 114 mins vs ABC 78, NBC 78). Since then, in Phase Four, the war in Afghanistan failed to average even an hour of annual coverage on all three newscasts combined: 58 minutes total (CBS 25, ABC 16, NBC 16).
It should be noted that war correspondents have not represented the entirety of the networks' journalistic efforts in Afghanistan over the past two decades: sidebar coverage to the fighting included internal Afghani politics and culture, education and aid efforts, the role of women, the opium trade and so on. This sidebar coverage added another 10% to 20% to the totals. Thus annual averages for total Afghanistan coverage for the four phases amounts to 685 minutes, 99, 376 and 72: the same narrative trend slightly larger totas.
In which way did the networks err? Were they wrong in downplaying an ongoing war in Phases Two and Four? Or are they exaggerating now when they portray the US involvement in Afghanistan as twenty years of continual bloodshed? My vote is for the latter. The Afghanistan War consisted of two violent periods: President George W Bush's drive to oust the Taliban from power in 2001 and 2002; and Obama's failed surge to put an end once and for all to the Taliban insurgency in 2009 through 2014.
Those two phases can properly be called warfare. The remainder, during which the Taliban insurgency was a low-intensity threat not confronted with full force by the US military, did not deserve the commensurate full attention of war correspondents.
And by the way, since no formal peace treaty has been agreed to -- only a temporary cessation of hostilities -- technically the United States is still at war on the Korean Peninsula: so the Korean War is America's Longest War, closing in on seven decades.]]>Network Newscasts Reinvent Election CoverageNetwork Newscasts Reinvent Election Coverage
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5788
Andrew Tyndall2020-11-02T03:41:31-08:00
Their half-hour nightly newscasts broke from tradition in their coverage of the Presidential election campaign this year. They made a radical shift in favor of democracy. They scaled down their fixation with the activities of the candidates on the stump -- in particular stripping attention away from Donald Trump. And they ramped up their focus on the people in charge: the voters themselves.
As the threats to the integrity of the election mounted, the networks' attention shifted accordingly. Tyndall Report has monitored the nightly newscasts' coverage of each quadrennial election cycle since 1988. Never before in any of the previous eight elections has so much attention been paid to the threats to a free and fair vote, nor to the efforts to secure the vote against any disruption.
During the final two months of the run-up to Election Day, the weekday newscasts of the three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS and NBC combined) devoted more than three hours (186 minutes) to the conduct of the election. In the previous eight cycles, the three newscasts devoted only 148 minutes in total to such issues. Previously the networks' coverage had its eyes on the campaigns, not on the voters.
Here is a rundown of election-focused stories since the start of September. They focused on the warning signs: fears of continued foreign interference, led by Russia; cybersabotage of voting machines and databases; failure of on-time delivery of mail-in ballots; rejection of a legitimate result through allegations of fraud; and, overshadowing all, worries about the health and safety of voting during a pandemic.
But the coverage also emphasized possible remedies: the precautions of intelligence operatives and software security; preparations to handle the huge influx of absentee ballots; widespread early voting, registration drives and get-out-the-vote mobilization; and social distancing protocols at voting precincts.
NBC, with its Vote Watch series of features, spent more time on this type of election coverage than its two rivals (75 mins v ABC 54, CBS 57). But all three stepped up their efforts significantly. At the same time all three networks scaled back their coverage of the candidates and their campaigns.
Clearly, the towering impact of the coronavirus pandemic has transformed every facet of life during 2020. It would have been impossible for the news assignment agenda at the network nightly newscasts not to be transformed too. In the first ten months of 2020, the coronavirus alone -- not counting its knock-on effects on the economy, public schools and colleges, sports and entertainment, restaurants and transportation -- has occupied more than a quarter of the nightly newscasts' entire newshole (3,308 minutes out of 12K). Here is a rundown.
Campaign 2020, during the first ten months of the year, took an extreme cut in coverage. Over the last eight cycles, the Presidential campaign has attracted a three-network average of more than 40 hours of nightly news coverage (2,513 minutes, ranging from a high of 3,531 for Obama-McCain in '08 to a low of 1,772 for Clinton-Dole in '96). This year the cutbacks have been so severe, that the first ten months logged a three-network total of only 969 minutes -- a cutback of more than 60%.
The average coverage for the final two months' run-up has been 741 minutes; this year the total was a mere 359 and here is that rundown. All the more remarkable, then, that the networks found that room in their newshole to transfer their attention from the conduct of the campaigns to the conduct of the election itself.
The withdrawal of attention from Campaign 2020 has fallen most harshly on Donald Trump. What a transformation: four years ago, in 2016, the Trump Campaign broke records for the amount of airtime it attracted. Of the 16 nominees in the eight cycles in Tyndall Report's database, none came close to the 1,099 minutes of coverage of Trump '16 (three-network totals for the first ten months of each year). By contrast, an average nominee in a race with an open seat attracted less than half Trump's airtime (511 mins).
Having overcovered him so egregiously in 2016, perhaps the networks' campaign desks were overcompensating. Granted, incumbent Presidents running for reelection always attract less attention than their challengers or than candidates running when the office is open. An incumbent President does not usually have to compete in primaries so receives less airtime in springtime. Furthermore, much of the coverage that incumbents receive is in their capacity as President not as candidate: the Rose Garden necessitates less time on the stump.
Nevertheless, even compared with previous incumbents (Bush in '92, Clinton in '96, Bush in '04, Obama in '12), Trump's Campaign '20 has been given short shrift. In the first ten months of 2020, the Trump Campaign attracted a scant 112 minutes on the three nightly newscasts, compared with an average of 271 minutes for those other four incumbents running for reelection.
That's a decline from 1,099 minutes in 2016 to 112 minutes in 2020.
To a lesser extent than the cuts Trump suffered, two of the other three staples of campaign coverage have also been scaled back during this pandemic year. The two parties' nominating conventions -- obliged to be held virtually and delegate-free -- obviously made less news than usual. In an average campaign year since 1988, the two conventions attracted 234 minutes combined; this year their total was only 111.
Equally, the average campaign of a challenger to an incumbent seeking a second term (Clinton in '92, Dole in '96, Kerry in '04, Romney in '12) received 408 minutes of coverage in that year's first ten months. Joe Biden, social distancing with a facemask in his basement, logged just half that amount: 194 minutes.
On the other hand, one aspect of the campaign year has remained stubbornly true to form. The debates. Even though the second meeting was canceled when Trump refused to participate in an online format, the traditional fall highlights of a campaign season held the same headlines that they always have. In the previous eight cycles, the Presidential debates attracted an average of 103 minutes of coverage. Amid all this change, some things stay the same. This year their total was 101. That's within the margin of error, as the saying goes.
Now let's hope that the admirable job the networks have done to alert their viewers to the dangers of a free and fair election pays dividends. Here's to a small-d democratic outcome.]]>The Disappearing Act of Campaign 2020The Disappearing Act of Campaign 2020
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5787
Andrew Tyndall2020-08-04T09:27:50-08:00
Compare the first seven months of 2020 with the first seven months of the previous eight election years (measuring electoral coverage on the broadcast television networks' weekday nightly newscasts starting in 1988) and a radical departure from normal protocols reveals itself.
A disappearing act is what has happened. In the face of the overwhelming dominance of the news agenda by the coronavirus pandemic, network coverage of the quadrennial rituals of electoral politics has been decimated.
Through the end of July, the three nightly newscasts (ABC, CBS & NBC combined) devoted a total of 368 minutes to the Presidential campaign during 2020. In an average campaign year, that total has been 1,417, almost four times as much.
The networks' ritual celebration of democracy lies in tatters. Ritual, here, is used advisedly: the predictable nature of the set piece events of the election season allows television news once every four years to enact its celebration, assigning vast resources to the spectacle of the campaign, whether the underlying events happen to be newsworthy or not.
The set pieces of the campaign -- the primary season, the Vice-Presidential selection, the nominating conventions, the debates, and Election Day itself -- determine the highlights of coverage. The daily drumbeat is supplied by the Boys-On-The-Bus tradition of following the candidates on the stump. The networks add the clout of backroom resources with their opinion polling operations and the result-calling projections.
At the end of 2019, it seemed as though the networks were set up for business as usual for a campaign year. Their volume of penultimate-year coverage was absolutely in line with previous cycles in which an incumbent was running, meaning that only one of the two parties was gearing up for a primary contest: 2019 logged 398 minutes, more than 2003, 1995 and 1991 (167 mins, 294 mins, 146 mins respectively) but less than 2011 (790 min).
But then the pandemic hit. Actual breaking news supplanted set-piece traditions. Of the 31 weeks of the year so far, the coronavirus has been the nightly newscasts' Story of the Week in 21 of them. Campaign 2020 has been the week's Top Story only twice: the weeks of the Democrats' Iowa caucuses and their New Hampshire primary, in both of which Joe Biden suffered defeat. Biden's subsequent path to the nomination has been all-but invisible.
Compared with the 368 minutes devoted to all aspects of Campaign 2020 in the first seven months of the year, the coronavirus has logged 2,744 minutes, fully one third of the entire newshole. Besides Iowa and New Hampshire, the only other non-COVID Stories of the Week have been the assassination of Iran's General Qasem Soleimani (twice), the impeachment trial of Donald Trump (twice), the death of Kobe Bryant (once) and the protests against police brutality following the chokehold killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis (three times).
Speaking of President Trump: when an incumbent runs, the nightly news covers him two ways, both as a candidate in his own re-election campaign, and as the president exercising the powers of his office. So it is normal for overall campaign coverage to be slightly lighter in re-election years, since the resources that would normally be devoted to the campaign beat are in part redirected to the White House beat. In the first seven months of the eight previous campaign years, coverage averaged 1,139 minutes with an incumbent running (with a low of 834 minutes in 1996) compared with 1,695 minutes with an open seat (with a high of 2,153 minutes in 2008).
Even as coverage of the coronavirus has clearly eclipsed both the Biden candidacy and Trump's re-election campaign, it turns out that it has also marginally sidelined Trump's oversized media presence, writ large, candidate-and-president combined.
Despite his in-person conduct of afternoon White House briefings on the coronavirus, despite his central role as defendant in the Senate impeachment trial, Donald Trump has had a somewhat diminished overall presence on the nightly newscasts compared with 2019. Last year, the three networks featured a Trump soundbite (on any topic whatsoever, governmental, campaign-related, or human interest) an average of 187 times each month. In the first seven months of 2020, that monthly average fell 15% to 160.
Donald Trump broke annual records four years ago for coverage of his campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton: he attracted 1,144 minutes in total, more than doubling her 506. Yet in the midst of the greatest crisis of his Presidency, even as he gears up to make his pitch for re-election, Trump suffers a diminished presence on the nightly news. And the campaign contest overall amounts to a mere afterthought.]]>Networks Stiffen Their Anti-Racist SpinesNetworks Stiffen Their Anti-Racist Spines
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5786
Andrew Tyndall2020-06-12T11:47:10-08:00Tyndall Report expressed its disappointment at the network nightly newscasts for relying on euphemism rather than reporting on systemic racism forthrightly.
What a difference a day makes!
Last night, the mealy mouthed "powerful" was nowhere to be heard. Instead there were three unequivocal surveys of the toll systemic police racism takes on African-Americans:
-- ABC's Pierre Thomas filed an Investigation into the disparate arrest records by race across jurisdictions nationwide.
-- NBC's Stephanie Gosk introduced us to the term-of-art Testilying, whereby police officers perjure themselves to avoid prosecution for corrupt racist violence.
-- NBC's Morgan Radford's Inequality In America entry documented the toll on the mental and physical health of African-Americans from living with the daily dread of racist mistreatment at the hands of the police.
Furthermore, ABC's editorial judgment about what breaking news developments were worthy of coverage was unusually influenced attuned to racism-based events:
-- Marcus Moore brought us the harsh handcuffing of a black teenager for jaywalking down a sidewalkless street in Tulsa
-- Steve Osunsami followed up on the police killing of Louisville EMT Breonna Taylor in her own home after a no-knock search. The officers killed her with eight bullets yet filed a report that she suffered no physical injury.
-- Adrienne Bankert narrated video of a public health legislative hearing in Ohio, in which a state senator cast the aspersion that African-Americans might not wash their hands properly.
And even on the trendwatch -- away from breaking news -- the newscasts assigned cultural features on the abiding legacy of Jim Crow and white supremacism:
-- CBS' Chip Reid (whose report was not posted online) was assigned to cover the fate of Confederate statuary in Richmond: Jefferson Davis is a goner, but Robert E Lee may survive as a canvas for graffiti.
-- NBC's Geoff Bennett revisited the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 on the city's selection for a Donald Trump campaign rally to be held on Juneteenth, the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
-- NBC's Blayne Alexander continued her survey of the waning appeal of the cultural artifacts of the segregated South: yesterday she told us about HBO pulling Gone With The Wind until they could attach a suitable historical disclaimer; her follow-up covered Disneyland's Song of the South, the renaming of Lady Antebellum, and NASCAR's ban on the Stars & Bars.
-- CBS' Adriana Diaz examined the newfound anti-racism of corporate public relations departments and wondered whether it had any staying power.
It is legitimate to wonder, with Diaz, whether staying power will apply to the nightly newscasts too. We'll stay tuned.]]>Look out for a new TV news euphemism for dealing with racismLook out for a new TV news euphemism for dealing with racism
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5785
Andrew Tyndall2020-06-11T02:31:15-08:00
Such routine use of the word turns out to be a redundancy. Any item that rises to the level of being interesting enough to deserve to take up time during a nightly newscast must, by definition, be especially resonant, or emotional, or vivid, or authentic, or controversial. Thus in the routine run of news "powerful" means little more than "newsworthy."
However, the news in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day has been anything but routine. Coverage of the street protests — and of the underlying police abuses that they are responding to — has meant that the mainstream network nightly newscasts have had to confront whether to name directly a phenomenon that has hitherto been taboo. The decision has to be made: whether the longstanding preference to refer to "race relations" or "racial frictions" in society must now be replaced with the more forthright (and to many ears, more accusatory) term "systemic racism".
So the term "Powerful" comes to the rescue. It has taken on a specialized extra meaning as the euphemism that is used to refer to speech that directly acknowledges that society's problem is one of racism.
So ABC World News Tonight on Tuesday referred to the sermons at George Floyd's funeral as "Powerful Messages." CBS Evening News on Wednesday referred to a white airline executive reading White Fragility by Robin Diangelo as having had a "Powerful Conversation" with an African-American flight attendant. NBC Nightly News on Tuesday described the statement to his troops by Gen Charles Brown, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force who happens to be African-American, on the racist history of the USAF history as a "Powerful Message."
Watch out for "Powerful". Nowadays it is a euphemism for someone who names systemic racism forthrightly without euphemism. Thus TV news can acknowledge the strength of the impact of referring to racism...while still sitting on the fence about the veracity of its underlying systemic diagnosis.]]>ABC Bets That Corona Crisis Is Muir's MomentABC Bets That Corona Crisis Is Muir's Moment
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5784
Andrew Tyndall2020-04-07T09:07:33-08:00ABC World News Tonight, which was already the nation's most-watched newscast even before the coronavirus struck, has taken the opportunity provided by this major news story to revamp its format. Anchor David Muir is more centrally in the spotlight than ever.
It is when headlines are heaviest that television news has its best chance to showcase its wares. Even in times when there is no public health crisis, the audience for news grows when major stories break as casual viewers join the ranks of the 20m-or-so regulars for whom the network nightly newscasts are part of their daily media diet.
The pool of viewers that the newscasts have a chance to impress always expands on the 5%-or-so of days when a major story takes up more than half of the networks' newshole. The coronavirus pandemic qualifies as such an event: it has been the top story each week since the third week of February, and has occupied at least half of the newshole since the first week of March.
The opportunity to convert sampling viewers into regular audience members is even greater under these pandemic circumstances. Stay-at-home laws mean that television in general has fewer rival distractions to tempt viewers' eyeballs. And the absence of sports means that the news has one fewer rival genre once television has been switched on. When the actual content of the news is important, viewers can find it no burden to abandon their binge streaming of sitcom reruns for an odd half hour in order to catch up on the day's headlines.
So the nightly newscasts have an unusual opportunity to regain the status they once enjoyed, as a regular journalistic date with a mass audience. As is to be expected during a period of dominance by a single story, all three networks have tightened their routines, taking a less scattershot approach, filing fewer and longer produced packages from their correspondents.
ABC World News Tonight has adapted to the crisis with radical changes. CBS Evening News, whose newly-arrived anchor Norah O'Donnell is least familiar to audiences, has made one notable innovation to showcase her talents. The changes at NBC Nightly News are smaller: the newscast has done less than its rivals to use the crisis to thrust anchor Lester Holt into the spotlight. This reluctance is puzzling, since NBC's publicity department has gone out of its way to present Holt as a unique asset. "Turn to the most trusted TV news anchor in America" is its marketing slogan.
To measure the format changes, the last three weeks of weekday newscasts (from March 16th through April 3rd) were compared with a three-week period before the outbreak. In order to avoid distortions that the holidays might cause, a three-week period between Thanksgiving and Christmas was selected: December 2nd through December 20th. This was a period when impeachment was working its way through the House of Representatives -- but the comparison did not examine the content of the newscasts; it examined their format instead.
First, there is the balance between anchors and correspondents: produced packages filed by correspondents are the staple of these newscasts, with the anchor largely confined to an introductory role. In the 15-day period in December, NBC had the most rapid-fire format, airing almost ten such packages on average for each newscast (140 in 15 days vs ABC 98, CBS 110). During the 15 days of corona domination, all three used fewer correspondents, with the cuts at ABC amounting to a radical 31% (only 68 produced reports vs CBS 92, NBC 115).
Second, the almost-daily innovation at CBS was to replace one of these correspondent packages with a newsmaker interview conducted by anchor O'Donnell herself. CBS Evening News included a corona interview on 12 of those 15 days, whereas the December period contained none at all. O'Donnell has questioned government officials -- the NIH's Anthony Fauci twice (here and here), the Surgeon General, the Secretary of Defense, White House coordinator Deborah Birx -- and public health experts along with in-house consultants.
Third, there are day's headlines: even in December, all three newscasts assigned to their anchors the task of introducing the day's agenda -- the so-called tease -- that is supposed to whet the audience's appetite to stay tuned rather than flipping the remote to check out more enticing fare. Already the tease had become tedious, taking on encyclopedic proportions, explaining each upcoming story in such detail that a viewer felt like a captive diner in a pretentious restaurant, having to listen to every last ingredient added to each dish, even the ones that would never be ordered.
So back in December, an ABC viewer would have to wade through an average of 2:15 minutes of teases before having the opportunity to hear what the first correspondent had to report; on CBS the wait was 2:09 minutes; on NBC 1:44.
See how the coronavirus has shifted the burden of presenting the details of the day's developments onto the anchor's shoulders: at NBC hardly at all with the first package being filed 1:54 minutes into the newscast; at CBS the introduction is slightly longer at 2:33.
But ABC has made David Muir so central to its news delivery that sometimes a viewer has to wait fully four minutes before any report is filed from the field. Muir teases all the stories of the day before his newscast's opening titles and then re-announces them all again before relinquishing the microphone. Compared with December, his introduction is fully 69% longer, for an average wait of 3:49 minutes before a newsgathering correspondent appears.
ABC appears to have decided that Muir will be a habit that is hard to break even after social distancing is repealed.]]>The Long & Short of the Impeachment HearingsThe Long & Short of the Impeachment Hearings
http://tyndallreport.com/comment/20/5783
Andrew Tyndall2019-11-16T10:09:20-08:00
In fact they may not be two separate criteria at all. Instead they seem to be two sides of the same coin. They assume this argument: in order to attract eyeballs the hearings have to appeal as entertainment, they have to have "pizzazz." If they fail to attract a mass audience -- fail to attract the same universal attention that the televised Watergate hearings attracted almost half a century ago -- then that is evidence of their lack of appeal as entertainment: hence, no pizzazz.
At root these criteria arise from an anachronistic media worldview not a contemporary political worldview. They assume that a mass audience still exists, ready to be summoned to their television sets, to sit down simultaneously to share the same live media content. The objection of no pizzazz turns out not to be a complaint about the content of the hearings, but a complaint that we no longer live in the 1970s.
Nowadays, that old-fashioned mass-medium gavel-to-gavel television enters the contemporary media ecosystem differently, not all at once and universally. It is now video, not television…and video is both quicker and slower, shorter and longer.
The short form impact is when micro-exchanges circulate as soundbites in news reports and in virally-shared gifs on social media. These can be flamboyant, like Jim Jordan's jacketless histrionics on the first day of the hearings, or they could be crisp and concise diplomatic understatements from a diction-perfect bow-tied Foggy Bottomer; or they could be that tell-all soundbite on the second day of hearings from the confrontation between Mr Tweeting President and Madame Witness Ambassador: "…very intimidating."
That is one way the hearings continue to exist beyond their live daytime audience.
As far as the long form is concerned, the contemporary media ecosystem teaches us that it is not the literal size of a daily audience that is a marker of cultural impact. In the era of streaming video, close viewing of continual hours by a hardcore committed audience -- binge-watching -- turns out to have a multiplier effect that has a more durable impact than superficial viewing by larger numbers of casual observers. Binge-watchers will not only tolerate hours of seemingly pizzazzless intricacy, they thrive on arcane details, developing conspiracies, quirky characters, devious sub-plots.
The multiplier effect is produced when binge-watchers share their obsessions. If in the 1970s, broadcasters relied on a network of local television stations to pipe their signal into everyone's homes, modern video relies on the social network instead, whereby committed viewers share the import of its streamed signal with the population at large.
Thus the hearings can enter the public square quickly and slowly, in short form and in long form, as viral gifs and as long-form binges. They do not depend on a universal live audience. And they do not depend on pizzazz to attract a mass of eyeballs.]]>