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Breaking Snooze: My Generation’s Declining Interest in Mainstream Television News




Published on October 20, 2009

by Austra Zubkovs

Image courtesy of MSNBC

By now, everyone in America with access to a television, newspapers or the Internet has heard of the infamous “Balloon Boy” hoax. The television news channels can’t stop talking about it. And for me, it confirmed my deep seated belief: don’t bother with network news any longer.

On October 15, every major television news network and even many local news stations all interrupted their regular news reports for a breaking news story that a small boy had gone afloat in a homemade hot air balloon in Northern Colorado. Video footage of a large spaceship-looking balloon zooming across the countryside shocked viewers, gluing them to their screens.

All reports at the time indicated Falcon Heene, age 6, had been playing with the hot air balloon his father, brothers and he had been constructing for the last few weeks. The eldest brother alerted his parents that Falcon had climbed in and took off and his mother frantically called emergency services.

Truth and speculation were often mixed together as fact in a complicated tangle of information: A boy was trapped in a balloon. The balloon had a basket. But the basket was unlocked! There was no basket on the balloon. The balloon could hold up to 50 pounds. This child’s name was Falcon. The older brother’s name was Falcon. The parents were once on the television show Wife Swap..? The balloon could stay up in the air for up to two hours. The balloon is suddenly descending. The balloon could crash, injuring the child trapped in the basket! The balloon lands fairly gently. There is a huge crew waiting to approach the balloon. The crew doesn’t seem to be approaching the balloon to find out if the boy is ok? No attempt is made to search for the child? One man begins hitting the balloon with a shovel? The child is not in the basket. The child must have fallen out. No one has reported a child falling into their yard, even though the area was highly residential. A video of the three sons in a (fairly inappropriate for their age) mock-rap video begins to circulate via YouTube?

As if there wasn’t enough space on the television, you could also get minute-to-minute updates online at the stations’ official websites through either continuously updated written reports or live streaming video or through any number of social networking sites.

I watched the events unfold wondering why not a single official report I heard (and I searched) ever once mentioned the possibility that the children were fooling around. So I used reason instead.

Falcon Heene, age 6

The balloon didn’t look strong enough to hold more than about 30 pounds.  A six-year-old boy is probably small enough to be inside it, but there would likely be indicators of his weight and size visible from the outside. Furthermore, as stated, Falcon is a six-year-old boy. His oldest brother is only nine-years-old. I have met six- and nine-year-old boys before and generally they are little rascals. The YouTube video certainly indicated as much. Playing such a prank sounds exactly what they might do at that age, without having the reasoning to realize the impact of their actions.

My conclusion after watching just a few minutes of footage: the boy was hiding out somewhere and never was inside the balloon.

Before the day was out Twitter accounts were made, political cartoons drawn, T-shirts and other apparel were designed, a Balloon Boy mini-videogame was created. I even saw every single recent comedic social-networking meme (Interrupting Kanye, The Hitler Rant, Insanity Wolf, Philosoraptor, Ragetoons, Xzibit’s Yo Dawg, just to name a few) morph into their version of the Balloon Boy drama. While the network news machines still remained silent on the issue of a possible hoax, these were the only outlets actually challenging the assumption of the missing boy.

Indeed, within a few hours, Falcon was found hiding upstairs in the garage attic. He may or may not have been inside a cardboard box. (His parents may or may not have hoisted him up there.)

Cue even more social networking meme scorn and very little backpedaling of the current news reports.

All this took place on a Friday afternoon. By the weekend, authorities had determined that it wasn’t just small boys playing a seemingly innocent prank but, in fact, a wide-spread hoax which involved the parents and allegedly even the local police sheriff. Reports now state the father, Richard Heene, had contacted the local television news station before his wife called emergency services. In an interview on Larry King Live, six-year-old Falcon even innocently admitted, “You guys said, that, um, we did this for the show.”

How did the entire news media get taken for such a loop? Why didn’t a single reporter or news anchor ever once vocalize a reasoned, skeptical, or investigative opinion? Furthermore, as I type this, five days after the event, Anderson Cooper’s 360 is on the television, speculating whether arrests will be made of the parents of little Falcon. Not only does he wonder this, but he has also brought on two guest speakers to debate the issue. Why does this event continue to take prime news space when there are plenty of hard-hitting issues to cover around the world?

This is exactly why I rarely bother with the mainstream news media anymore. No one I know of in my generation watches television news anymore, and increasingly neither do the people I know who are older than me. In a typical search for news, I will start by scanning the websites of the BBC and CNN, which to me seem to usually be the least sensational of the bunch. But then I additionally rely on outlets like RSS feeds of more in-depth articles, documentaries, analytical magazines, or even comedic, faux-news programs like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report, two shows which, though their prime focus is clearly comedy, seem like the only televised investigative journalism outlets left.

I think 20-somethings have lost faith in the mainstream news media. This fact was greatly apparent at the 2009 Campus Progress Conference I attended this past July. Campus Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress, works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter to them. The annual conference in Washington, D.C. brought together hundreds of young people to examine the task of “Delivering Change” (The conference even kicked off by some slam poetry by slam poet Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, who was actually the subject of our own 2007 Media That Matters Film Festival winner By-Standing: The Beginning of an American Lifetime).

But the event that seemed to draw the biggest attention to this lack of faith in mainstream media was during the second day where John Oliver, comedian and Emmy-nominated writer and correspondent of The Daily Show, had students rolling. Though comedy was the main point of the interview, to the packed crowd of liberal, college-aged students, some words hit home stronger than others.

John Oliver at the 2009 Campus Progress Conference

“I bet a bunch of you are about to be journalists… we’re about to be enemies,” Oliver announced, with his famous straight-faced cynicism. “…unless you do your job well.”

This type of humor, typical of the entire Daily Show cast, has been gaining momentum in the news arena for those aged 18-35, though Oliver insists this shouldn’t be so. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2007 Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show for the last ten years, ranked fourth as the most admired journalist, tying with those such as Tom Brokaw, Anderson Cooper, and Dan Rather.

Overall what we are seeing in a transformation in all areas of news media: in journalism techniques, the audience, and the platforms information is transmitted across. We are in a time where we’ve become saturated with information from every outlet – and it’s not just available, but we crave it. In response, news has now become accessible anywhere: television, the Internet, your cell phone, your iPod, and any number of other new technologies. Because of these options and the ease at which my 20-somethings generation has adapted to digital technologies, we have grown less dependent on just television news and have a greater availability of trusted sources (like RSS feeds, podcasts, Twitter, etc) than ever before that allows us to do our own fact-checking with a greater speed.

This fact creates a snowball effect where the television news stations now need to ferociously compete for our attention. They created 24-hours news stations as well as Internet version with even more up-to-the-minute reports to meet this demand for constant information, but are still left with little that they can claim exclusive or unique coverage on. This causes them to then latch on to whatever “sensational” news comes their way. Reporting news this way invariably leads to many mistakes in reporting and leaves little time for fact-checking, decreasing the reliability of the reports and therefore the news outlets cover them. This is also how the space was created for something like the “Balloon Boy Hoax” to exploit the media.

As a result of all this over exposure, people are now beginning to crave filters. By tuning into The Daily Show, a media consumer can get a healthy dose of comedy and the most important news headlines all in one sitting. And since the show is only a half an hour long, once an evening, they have to be choosy about the topics they cover and precise about the humor they use.

Many students at the Campus Progress conference hounded John Oliver during the question and answer session, praising how The Daily Show is one of the only programs asking the tough questions they want to hear from regular news programs. Furthermore, the show specifically attacks these other mainstream news programs for being so frivolous and sensationalist. But Oliver doesn’t even want their criticism to be taken seriously. “We’re not Media Criticism Central,” he said. “The way we pick apart the media is not journalism. It’s a pretty childish way to make a living.”

Image courtesy of symmetrymagazine.org

But it goes beyond humor, even if the writers and cast are reluctant to admit it. Stewart, Oliver, and the rest of the cast at The Daily Show refuse to relent that their show should be taken as anything more than just comedy. “Though I play a journalist, I’m not. So I don’t have to follow rules, like… fact checking… or politeness,” said Oliver.

He says one reason he might seem like a journalist is because of the way Daily Show interviews catch people off-guard, unlike the sugar-coated questions usually asked by mainstream journalists. “They’re not used to being talked to the way I talk to them.” He joked that it might also have to do with the “natural authority of [his] British accent.”

Oliver even stated that in fact, insisting The Daily Show was a reliable news program wasn’t so much a compliment to the show, but a more telling critique of traditional news sources: “I watch cable news all day. And it’s not good. That is the best I can say about it – that it’s not good.”

All this said, I don’t actually think The Daily Show or any show on Comedy Central should be relied upon as an actual source of news. In fact, I believe shows like this only exist because of the current state of mainstream news media. The statistics about my generation choosing them over mainstream news outlets means not that we’re just looking for the cheap comedic thrill of news (we could get that through the network news) but are craving hard investigative pieces and are tired of fluff and sensationalism.

The only nightly news program I’ve seen come close to my ideals of a quality television program is the The Rachel Maddow Show, which debuted in September 2008. She cuts to the heart of the issues while still remaining satirically comedic, and also while still retaining the journalistic integrity that The Daily Show correspondents refuse to acquire. But by now I’ve sworn off TV news and only catch her shows from time to time online.

What about you? Do you think television news is dead? What do you rely on for your news gathering?

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This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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Comments

This is a great article, thank you. I definitely find it interesting that so many of the criticisms about the “death of investigative journalism” point to the internet / blogging / “citizen journalism” models, rather than the sorry state of network or mainstream media. I’m also a big fan of radio - an often overlooked source of news for a huge portion of the world without daily access to TV / internet.

Posted on 2009 10 22 by leah

Great article. I agree wholeheartedly; however, I would say that some daily news programs (such as NBC nightly news) are still worthwhile. Why? Because they’re not concerned with covering everything at the exact instant it happens. They leave time for investigation and fact-checking (what some would call journalism), while the 24 hour news networks just re-post reports from the Associated Press and then spend hours seeking the opinions of their stables of pundits (who often come from the depths of obscurity and stupidity). A note to the 24 hour news networks: fire every pundit you have and spend the money instead on hiring good foreign journalists. There may be 24 hours worth of news in a day, but you won’t find it all in America in a balloon hovering over the suburbs. And stop worrying about scoops. There’s no such thing any more.

Posted on 2009 10 22 by Evan