I confess! I watch TV news. I know, that's like admitting I like potato chips (which I do). Both are just empty calories. Still, in recent years, it's become a habit. I think it's partly Pavlovian association - for example, the 6 p.m. news and a little glass of wine just seem to go together. And of course, it's possible to get some information from the process: a quick checklist of main stories at the end of the day, a sense of topics you might want to go get more information about, and the most timely weather and sports.
None of that changes the fact that television news is dying as fewer and fewer viewers bother to tune in. The reasons are quite different from those affecting newspapers, however. Newspapers are in the news business. Television, after a brief flurry of idealistic hopes in the 1950s that it could provide serious programming, is in the entertainment business. Public broadcasting is no exception. News is just a part of the mix, as the following random observations demonstrate:
One of our local TV channels pursues an odd reporting strategy: (a) the sports announcer traveled halfway across the country to cover a game that didn't involve a local team; (b) a reporter was sent to L.A. to provide insight(?) on a Hollywood awards production; (c) the local anchor flew off to cover the Republican national political convention. What is the added value for a local station to cover any of these events? The cost of these boondoggles should be balanced against local reporting, where the local station presumably has a unique role to play. Yet this same station recently announced it is firing several local reporters for cost reasons. I timed half-hour local and national news broadcasts for their real news content, leaving out commercials, the repetitive teasers about what stories are coming up, and the small-talk among the reporting team. Result: national news, less than 10 minutes of actual reporting; surprisingly the local news, at about 11 minutes, did better (but not well). Scheduled news broadcasts are regularly bumped by any other type of programming; a regular show, a special, a sports event. If the terrorist attacks of September 2001 had occurred on a Sunday afternoon during NFL season instead of a Tuesday, and we depended only on television, we might not know about them yet. About a year ago, one national network was "reporting" on its new entertainment shows later that night as if they were news. (I haven't seen that lately; I hope they've stopped.)
So, very few people I talk to seem to depend on television for news any more, but it's hard to know if that's because they use other sources, or because there's nothing there.
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