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 What does it mean to American journalism when TV talk show host Larry King is considered our most influential TV journalist? |
How much do we give up
if news caters to dummies?
By MURRY FRYMER
Crack Reporter for
TheColumnists.com
MY FIRST newspaper editor, the renowed Louis B. Seltzer at the Cleveland Press, took me aside one day and told me how to write: "You should write your stories as if your readers are all 11 years old," he told me.
What insight Louis B. had! He was probably the most famous editor in Cleveland history, although he is best known for sensationalizing the Sam Shepard murder case to such an extreme that Dr. Sam won a new trial and an early release.
Anyway, I mulled Mr. Seltzer's wise words and then decided that I knew better. Readers of newspapers are not that dumb, I felt.
Well, now, some years later, I still remember the words and am still questioning whether Louis B. or Murry F. was right. I guess if you listen to TV "journalism" these days you have to think that Louis B. was on to something. TV pundits report the news in a manner that indicates that listeners may, in fact, be younger than 11, or, like kids, that they have no interests beyond the sensational and prurient. Of course there has always been a branch of journalism that has acted in this fashion, but now that branch has grown into a tree. And the other branch, the Edward R. Murrow branch, has been cut off entirely.
TV journalism is the world of Elian Gonzalez and Gary Condit and O.J. Simpson and Princess Grace and on and on like that. Edward R. Murrow's concern with migrant workers and their plight is but a distant memory. Murrow, today, might have delved deeply into the sorrow of seniors unable to afford prescription drugs and dying because of it. He might have scratched other surfaces--the vast gulf between America's affluent and the middle class, the corporate dominance of the media (and everything else), the desperate failure of public education, and even a study of how a none-too-accomplished son of a former president managed to ascend to his father's throne.
Oh, I could go on. And though my suggestions give away my own political biases, there might even be room for insightful reporting in more conservative bailiwicks--the religious impact on American policy. Heck, we might even delve into the shortage of blue-collar skills and the bias that a college-addicted society has toward the laboring class.
But all this is out of the TV picture now. Our lead "journalist" now is not Murrow but Larry King, a former all-night talker, who pursues every Condit that comes into view. And it is no longer absurd, as it once might have been, to devote five nights a week for five months to a "discussion" among the same yentas about who is sleeping with whom.
Actually, I think that most 11-year-olds would have turned all this off months ago. Oh, one or two might wonder about that little detail in all this--the missing Chandra Levy and how something horrible might have happened to her in plain daylight in the nation's capital. If many thousands of people disappear annually never to be seen again, just what is this nation doing to protect its citizens? All of us with wives or daughters would like to think that they might not just disappear one day, to be presumed dead, with no clue as to how or why.
I think that back in those early days of my career I might have argued with Louis B. Seltzer. I might have said that the reader will respond if he is treated at a mature adult and that we would be putting out a hellava better newspaper. Oh, sure, the National Inquirer has a higher circulation than the New York Times, but just which paper has the greater influence and, in fact, which paper makes the most money? And which paper would Louis B. Seltzer prefer to be editing?
Today's journalism--and I refer not only to TV, but the great mass of American newspapers, all owned by corporate chains--is a woeful blight on the once uplifting image of the press. That image was why the Constitution provided special protections to the press and why our courts have usually safeguarded them.
It might be useful to point out that newspapers have been losing circulation for years. It might also be useful to point out that the Cleveland Press folded. The public has long since ceased looking to journalists for the guidance and insight that they should find in our camp. No, now we tune in for titilation. After Condit, someone new will be found and some new gossipy topic exhausted to fill the gaping void.
Now that we have designed
much of our news world for dummies, those dummies have to be
served, night after night, peephole after peephole, Condit after
Condit.
© 2001 by Murry Frymer. The Frymer caricature © 2000
by Jim Hummel. Larry King photo courtesy of the TNT cable network.
You
can comment on this column or contact Murry Frymer with an email
to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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