by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
Joe Tartaro, Executive Editor
I’m old enough to remember Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevaried and Howard K. Smith, a few of the more famous lions of television news back when there were just three major television networks. These were sober, professional journalists who based their news reports on solid facts, not just leaks and rumors. And they were not merely talking heads. What they said and how they said it had substance. In short, it was news you could take to the bank. People believed in them.
In the years since these giants dominated the media, along with a number of other professional journalists unlisted here, a lot has changed—and not for the better. We still have the three major television networks, but we also have a half dozen cable so-called news networks, and a host of other news sources available on the Internet. They are all competing for audience, relevance and advertising dollars.
Of course, nowadays the public has a wider choice of news sources than ever before, almost to the point of being barraged by new information. For example, when one tunes in to one of the news networks, one is faced with multiple screens and multiple story lines. In addition to the lead focus, there are stacks of crawls running across the bottom of the screen, more often than not following totally different story lines, or messages, from the one the anchor or lead reporter is delivering.
Too often, the stories are based on scraps of scattered facts so the viewer gets distorted news reports, or on political news leaks that can reverse the narrative of a story. In an effort to be first with the news, the public is fed scraps of facts, which are often later corrected as the real facts become available.
A typical example is the rush to report a shooting incident, like the one involving Republican congressmen and their staffs practicing for an upcoming bipartisan baseball game. Of course, this is serious news, and should have been reported as soon as possible, but the public was fed scraps of uncorroborated news.
Depending on your relationship to any of the people injured or killed, the story deserved less rush and more facts. The seriousness of the injury to Rep. Steve Scalise, of course, would not be known until doctors had had time to examine him. As it turned out, Scalise was much more seriously injured than was previously reported, requiring multiple operations, but by then the narrative had shifted.
As might be expected, a number of politicians immediately focused on the instrument rather than the actor who used it and issued new calls for gun control. But they were not alone. They were immediately joined by the political commentators who now infest our national news channels, followed quickly by the print media commentators. Their quick solution to the problem of random violence was to advise more gun control, or more accurately, gun prohibition solutions. The most frequent initiative suggested is to reestablish President Bill Clinton’s ban on semi-automatic versions of military lookalikes.
Clinton’s gun and magazine ban was a hoax when it was enacted in 1994. It was a hoax when it sunset. And it is a hoax in the states that enacted their own bans.
It is a hoax because it focuses attention on the instrument or tool rather than on the people who use them to commit violence against their fellow human beings.
Drawing further upon the baseball shooting incident, there is endless talk in the current media about the state of mind of the Illinois man who fired the gun in Alexandria, Virginia, and his politics. Somehow, a few of the commentators have linked the incident to the current political extremes in American politics.
Yes, passions can run high—and wild—in politics. The shooter was a Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 election cycle, and apparently an avid anti-Trump man. But neither Sanders nor Trump has anything to do with the shooting.
However, we cannot say for sure that the media did not have something to do with the shooter’s state of mind.
Nowadays, especially on cable news networks, hours of prime time are filled by confrontations between gaggles of talking heads who spout some of the most outrageous comments in heated debates. Often, they end up shouting at one another. And some of the ideas they spout are likely to contribute to the state of mind of some of their viewers.
The talking heads and news readers on television were ridiculed some years back by the character of Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. The idea that a guy with the appearance of gravitas and a deep voice would be more believable on television persists. Ted Baxter was a joke, but a joke that is personified on television news of that day, and it’s a joke that lives on in current times.
We still have airheads reading the news as written by others, getting prompts through their earbuds as he or she speaks, flanked by squads of “experts” who can and do say anything they want. It’s small wonder that the American public has such a low opinion of the media. According to last year’s Gallup polling, the public’s confidence in the media is at a record low. Particularly when it is apparent that there is a feeding frenzy in print and broadcast news to hobble the Trump administration by focusing on any negative news connected to the original 2016 presidential campaign, the transition period, and/or the early days of the Trump presidency.
It is small wonder, too, that a deranged man from Illinois can take up a gun and turn it on innocent people. Media does matter, the messages it delivers may have a causative relationship to the violence that it reports.
