Fark's Drew Curtis On How "News" Isn't News
Brian Montopoli: In printing soft, wacky, and oddball news - or "crap," as you put it in your book title - aren't the media simply giving people what they want? News is a business, after all.
Drew Curtis: Yes, however a lot of what people want isn't news, and we're talking about news sources giving up on their core mission - informing us. Journalism is straying into entertainment. The lines between serious news segments, news entertainment, and news comedy are blurring. For example, just last week CNN led with a story about a nudist colony trying to attract new members with free beer. What is the intrinsic value of delivering this under the guise of news? The problem is a lot of people like to watch videos of nudists with their bits fuzzed out, lots more than the latest body count from Iraq, as was evidenced by CNN.com's Most Popular list.
How can we fix this Afghanistan mess? What's Russia doing in Estonia these days? Is global warming real? Does anyone care? Sadly, few do.
Most people treat the news media like the exercise bike they have in their basement. They're glad it's there but they never use it. This is obviously a ratings problem for the news outlets.
The number one question I get when I meet people who read my website is "Where can I go to get the real news?" The implication is the major news outlets aren't meeting this need. Most people I've talked to are convinced that they're not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I'm not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them.
It's not just consumers that are annoyed by this. Journalists themselves are in the same boat. I've met hundreds over the past few years, they're disgruntled and angry because they went into journalism to cover real stories and make a real difference, not waste time discussing drunk Germans getting arrested driving down the street in motorized wheelchairs.
If this is news to any media executives out there, I suggest they hold an all hands on deck meeting and let [reporters] freely express their frustrations. Ask them what they think about the stories they've been asked to cover and the priority that has been given to the stories. They'll get an earful.
Brian Montopoli: You complain about fear mongering in the media, but acknowledge that no one would ever read a book called "Things Are Not All That Bad." If you were running a newscast during a slow news period, what sorts of stories would you put on the air?
Drew Curtis: I have no answer for that. Therein lies the problem, newscasts have to run every day regardless of whether anything is going on or not. They can't just not run when nothing is going on. It would be nice if they could, but that would completely kill ratings. This is why news media isn't entirely at fault for some of the patterns in the book. They have to draw eyeballs AND inform. Sometimes these two goals are at odds.
Brian Montopoli: In the book, you talk about the media's tendency to provide "equal time for nutjobs." Can you give a particularly egregious example?
Drew Curtis: A reporter journeyed to Aurora, a small Texas town, to locate the grave of a supposed alien who crash landed there in 1897. It was a pretty long article, which ends with the statement: "I'm not convinced anyone in Aurora actually believes in the alien." That's right, several hundred words down the page we're told that this entire adventure is a load of crap.
The headline reads "Can a space alien rest in peace?" Anytime you see a headline with a yes/no question like that, the implication is that the fantastic is actually true, but the reality is that it's not. They usually get around to mentioning that right at the end of the story.
You want to know the ones I really dislike? Jesus' face appears on something. I think we can safely say that the vast majority of these sightings are not the result of the interest of a higher power in baked goods or highway overpasses, but instead are instigated by people looking for free advertising to sell things on eBay. I once read an entire article about a couple of trees falling into the shape of a cross in someone's backyard. Yeah, two trees fell on each other and it made an X.
Stop the presses, it must be Jesus.
Brian Montopoli: Why do you think the amount of what you call news "filler" - stories that aren't really news but are presented as such - is increasing?
Drew Curtis: The main problem is the 24 hour news cycle. ESPN has this problem with sports, it's impossible to fill 24 hours with sports programming so they have to resort to things like poker and arm wrestling tournaments. Same goes with news, in a 24 hour cycle the amount of space to fill is vast.
From the advent of radio until the advent of 24 hour news networks, news broadcasts were only a part of the programming. It's possible to fill a half hour broadcast with good quality material. Although it's interesting to note that network evening news programs aren't aired during primetime.
Why? They don't draw the ratings. Unless it's about catching child molesters.
24 hour broadcasts have to stretch limited material to fit 24 hours worth of space. It's even worse on the Internet. Pre-Internet, news was consumed in bulk. When you bought Newsweek you bought the entire magazine. When you watched the CBS "Evening News," you consumed the entire thing (or so Nielsen would have us believe anyhow). On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not. For example, I used to read Newsweek only for their political cartoon roundup. Previously I counted as a magazine purchase. Now I count as one miniscule pageview, that is when I remember to read it at all.
Go to any news website that shows what the most popular stories are and see what people are reading. It's all crap. This isn't because news media is pushing the content on them, they're voluntarily clicking them. This is what people want. So here's the problem: as a news outlet, do you take a more serious approach to news and thus sacrifice ratings, or do you put more of what people want - non-news? Some outlets have given up all pretense of trying to be news leaders. In print media, they call these Tabloids. What do we call an entire network that used to be news but quit trying a while ago? That word hasn't been invented yet. Although I can think of a few three letter words that fit...
Brian Montopoli: You've identified what you see as the problem with the media. What's the solution?
Drew Curtis: It's not a problem as much as it's a credibility issue. You can't be "The Most Trusted Name in News" and run lead stories on tattooed fish or musical condoms. The problem is if you get rid of those stories, web traffic drops and ratings go down. I personally would like to see a distinct split between hard news and crap. Maybe warn everyone before the newscast that the next half an hour will be about senior citizens posing nude for calendars to raise money for charity, the latest thing Paris Hilton said, or coverage of thousand dollar hamburgers being sold at New York restaurants. That might actually raise ratings and allow people who are interested in real news to save some time. I suggest in the book splitting networks in two, having one be real news and one be fluff news. Then when news breaks, take all the journalists doing fluff news and put them on the real story. I've been since told that isn't possible by journalists, I assume they know better than I do about those kinds of things. I'm not a journalist, I am however a professional media consumer.