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EYE ON EUROPE |
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The new look in TV news:
Make it more excruciating
of TheColumnists.com
He likes to model his new Prada blazer. He has an active fan club and he pouts obligingly for magazine covers. A flood of mail comes in from hetero women and gay men. His gunmetal gray hair is gelled into place and viewers are riveted by his squinty, spooky, ice-blue eyes.
He personally acknowledges that he knows nothing about reporting--what it is and what it isn’t. “I’m making it up as I go along,” he told a talk show host recently. He has no background as a journalist.
But he loves being part of the story. His delivery is all about intimacy and approachability. He even slurs his lines to prove he is just folks, and he writes in comfortable clichés, as when describing Israeli forays into Lebanon as war “up close and personal”.
He, of course, is the man with two last names, the man you can’t avoid if you have access to a television set, he is Anderson Cooper, the Super Scooper of CNN, the boy reporter who has become the world’s first accidental journalist in the new unfettered world of television news.
I am watching this person and don’t like what I see. He reminds me of an aging Pee Wee.
Mr. Cooper embodies all the qualities the journalist is supposed to eschew--vanity, emotion and personal involvement in what is being observed.
His weepy reports following Hurricane Katrina launched him as the new CNN power on screen. Now he operates from something called the “360 Command Center”. More avuncular voices such as Aaron Brown had to go to make room for him.
Mr. Cooper leads this new world at CNN, which promotes him Hollywood-style. A real journalist would die of embarrassment. I cringe for him.
Still photos from the Middle East (albeit in the safety of Larnaca, Cyprus) on the CNN website show him sitting alone in the shadows, now pondering his prose, now holding his head in his hands. He looks so lonely it breaks your heart.
But he is only one of a growing family of mythologized talent recently undermining the CNN information flow from the Middle East. These people are selected mainly for their ability to project their personalities, to jump straight off the screen and into your living room and sit on your sofa and drink your beer.
Up there in Mr. Cooper’s league are Christiane Amanpour and poor old Larry King. Less visible in the United States but all over CNN International are buzzsaw personalities Becky Anderson and Richard Quest, who after a respectable BBC career turned himself into an outlandish news-clown.
On the CNN menu today is journalism lite. It is designed to make you nervous without quite disturbing your day.
Taken together, these five have cheapened television news beyond the worst fears of serious media observers. Style always wins over content in TV but CNN has taken it to new depths.
Miss Amanpour has become our friendly Iranian and now is sufficiently arrogant to push the U.S. military around to get the shot she wants, according to one officer’s complaint. She also has a love for cliché writing such as urging action “sooner rather than later”.
Coiffed, if that is the word, in a helmet-style hairdo and dressed in men’s clothing, she allows herself to become part of the story. She revels in being known among journalists as a harbinger of violence when she shows up with her crew. She is a natural for in-your-face delivery. I feel knocked back across the room when she is in full flow.
And then we come to Larry King, another man who masquerades as a journalist. CNN brass has started using him in a new role that takes him out of soft celebrity chitchat. Now he anchors reports from real CNN correspondents around the Middle East.
Visibly aging and very tired, the King slumps lizard-like across his desk and reads carefully from a script, “Let’s go to Beirut. What’s doin’ over there?” “Okay, now let’s go to Tel Aviv. What’s doin’ over there?” This is Anchor King at work. Promotional spots show him yelling into the camera in his Brooklyn-accented English, “I’ve done a thousand interviews and I’m just gettin’ warmed up.” That sounded like a threat.
CNN is the Avis of television news, always scrambling for ratings against bigger and even crasser Fox News and a fast-changing world of tastes and delivery channels. Trying to figure out how to stay alive in this unpredictable competitive world is no picnic. But surely placing style above content and throwing out the ethical foundations of journalism is the wrong path forward.
©2006 by Michael Johnson. The photo of Anderson Cooper is courtesy of CNN. This column first posted July 31, 2006.
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