What Happened to the News?

The other day a very good point was brought up on a radio talk show I listen to. The host is an old school journalist. He attended the University of Florida back in the seventies (I think) when news was really news. I too went to the UF and studied journalism. Even in my day (1983) it was pounded into us that news was comprised of facts and ABSOLUTELY nothing else. I was terrified of misspelling a name or not properly checking out a source, misquoting someone and all other manner of not correctly reporting the truth.

This talk show host, who is prone to rants, has been on a tirade because of a local television news story that aired this week. The story involves a stretch of interstate highway running between Daytona Beach and Orlando, Florida. Evidently this stretch yields a very high number of accidents and, upon investigation, the reason was determined to be…ghosts.

Now, I heard snippets of the story and I heard the talk show host’s opinion about those snippets. So I don’t have hard facts here either. But the Florida Highway Patrol is denying statements credited to them by the news reporter and the show host cited the picture accompanying the story as being bogus. He says there is no place on this interstate with a double yellow line and the picture, which supposedly portrayed a ghostly figure, was taken on a road with a double yellow line.

May sweeps bring out the best efforts of all to compete for soap money (advertising dollars) and apparently news folks aren’t exempt from the pressure, driven by…well…greed. But we all suffer for this. I totally agreed with what the talk show guy was saying because I’ve noticed the increase in hype in every aspect of the news for a while now. It seems like they’ll do anything to get attention, including out and out lie.

Walter Cronkite would turn over in his grave if he could see some of the stuff being reported today. The demands of the American public have forced journalistic stooping to embarrassing depths. When our local news station couldn’t squeeze anything more out of the Virginia Tech story, it resorted to two weeks of interviewing University of Central Florida students, as if the tragic incident had occurred there. Just report what happened and move on.

We, as a society, are so drama driven and out-of-the ordinary oriented that we push them to tell us lies. Even the weather reports have become embellished to the point we have no idea what’s going to happen until it actually does. That’s just plain unsafe.

People want American Idol. They want Dancing with the Stars. They want life to be fantasy and news to be dicey all the time. Whether we like it or not, today’s news is a lousy economy, a senseless death toll in Iraq, weird weather patterns, resulting from human decimation of the environment, out of control crime and children (aka future  generations). These are the things that impact us and things we’re responsible for. Escaping into a foxtrot with Magic Johnson or being persuaded to play ghostbusters on I-4 does not a societal contribution make.

The news used to appeal to people because they cared about real issues. They got educated and they got motivated, even if the news was bad. Especially when it was bad. This would be the time to throw a little good news into the mix too. Report what’s actually happening, good and bad, without letting a spoiled, must-be-entertained public dictate a “rumor mill” version of journalism. At this point, I hesitate to even call it that. The news today is so far from what I call journalism, it’s like a completely different genre.

People need to be taught and re-taught that life happens. When we call for it to be skewed, we deprive ourselves of growth opportunities that come from dealing with reality–good, bad or indifferent. Life’s going to happen no matter what. In all instances, it’s better to deal with it head on than it is to head it off. So I hope that some day soon journalists are able to return to the job of reporting actual news and that we are able to be adult enough to watch it as such.