Katie Couric, after all the hype, hand-wringing, and haranguing, has finally settled in as the inheritor of the Tiffany Network’s “Voice of the News” mantle.
Whatever.
If you’re interested in reading reviews of how she read the teleprompter, check out this roundup of various media mavens at the Poynter Institute’s site.
What interests me is not how convincingly Katie reads, but what Media Matters had to say about the opening night. Under the headline “CBS Evening News With Couric Scores Net's Best Ratings in Seven Years” Marc Berman proceeds to spew forth a breathless blizzard of figures regarding the ratings performance of her debut. Here’s a taste:
* 13.59 million viewers (which damn near lapped both NBC and ABC which attracted 7.76 and 7.58 million, respectively)
* A boffo 9.1/17 vs. 5.2/10 ratings/share improvement from the same night a year ago.
What amazes me is that this is all presented as somehow being significant. It’s not. It’s merely a lot of lookyloos responding to hype. As with so much media, the snapshot reveals nothing. In short, let’s wait until the dust settles and the honeymoon ends. I give it about two months to figure out if Ms. Couric really changes the ratings. And even if she does, I’m not sure that it should matter to anyone who isn’t holding a bundle of CBS stock.
And my prognostication regarding time frame is as insignificant as having Ms. Couric read the teleprompter. I do have a few points to make, though.
One: the need to have an instant response to all manner of events delivered in a tone of expertise is silly. Yet the need to attract eyeballs and persuade viewers/readers of a news outlet’s or analyst’s insight drives organizations to do this over and over and over again. Even if it is a silly, vacuous gesture.
Two: the one good thing about laying out all these numbers is that it lays bare what some media analysts, and certainly the industry itself, regards as interesting and meaningful: the numbers. Actually, the numbers aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but they do translate pretty directly into higher ad rates. That means more revenue and that means more profit and that means more happy shareholders. Those of you who thought this was about news and information and public service have bought into a myth. (Yes, many of you know this, but being reminded of what the media are really there to do – that is, make money for shareholders – needs to be reiterated now and again since the media themselves won’t remind you.)
Three: I’m pretty cynical about the nightly news broadcasts. First, you can’t do much in 22 minutes. Second, a lot of what goes on is acting, plain and simple; Katie Couric is supposed to look solid and reassuring and thoughtful. Whether she is or isn’t is an entirely different issue. Third, so much of what one needs to make sense of the conditions of the world, things like history and other contextualizing background, just can’t be had on television. Television can be hard-hitting and concrete. But deep or thoughtful or thorough? Not likely.
Four: Media lean very hard on narrative. That is, storytelling. And that creates problems with how we understand things. Narratives tend to rely on tension, on oppositions, on good guys and bad guys. Certainly the universe and our social order has tension in it. But sometimes the nature of that tension is not just about two opposing forces. Relationships can be multifaceted, messy, and knotty. This is at least one reason why Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” model has enjoyed so much traction: it fits into the standard narrative framework very comfortably. However, it probably isn’t right. And a more completely, truthful, and accurate accounting of how modernism works with traditional societies and cultures, including Muslim fundamentalists, is messier, but just plain harder to report. Especially in neat, clean, pat, one-off 6 minute segments.
Of course, about 2 in 3 Americans still rely on TV news.( This statistic is pretty much the case for both national and local; note that there’s next to no state coverage in the US even though we rely on a federal administrative structure to do a lot of our governing and that means that a lot of crucial business happens at the state level… I’ll come back to this in a later note.) Given this, it’s really no wonder that we seem to have only a slippery grasp on the workings of government, the motives of our leaders, and the roiling, chaotic nature of international relations. To go beyond this fog of confusion, we need to work a bit harder to be informed. The question is, why bother?
September 18, 2006
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