Eyewitness Moods : Anchors as Actors, Feelings as Facts--the Information Age Proves No News Is Bad News

CHECK ME IF I’m wrong, but this society was supposed to have passed into the Information Age. Maybe, given the fact that we don’t seem to make things anymore, we had even been transformed into an Information Society--producers and consumers and distributors of a product that frees men’s souls and doesn’t pollute. So what happened to Information?

Obviously, we’re still surrounded by media feeding us what sometimes seems to be news. But, like the actor who really wants to direct, the people who are supposed to inform us have their minds focused on other business.

This is why, for example, network anchors are becoming so comically unbelievable. They jet around the world, pausing only when their “stand-up” shot in front of the local landmark is being composed to ask the crew, “By the way, what’s the mood here?” Then they turn to stone and intone, “The mood here tonight is one of concern but not yet alarm.”

These are smart men, and some of them even work for smart men. This isn’t happening because they can’t figure out how to tell us something real. It’s going on because they’ve decided that by the time the evening news hits the air, it’s too late to tell us the news. Their primary job now is to convey emotions to us.

The budget crunch at the networks folds nicely into this scenario. Rather than maintain correspondents around the world in case news happens, just fly in one of the few stars remaining on the roster, someone we already identify with, and let us identify with what he feels upon his sudden arrival. But conveying emotions is an actor’s job, not a newsperson’s. These may be smart men, but, as anybody who’s suffered through Dan Rather’s lurching from portentous pout to confidential wink can attest, they’re lousy actors.

If this phenomenon were limited to network newscasts, it would be disturbing enough. But places we might turn to for more informative stuff are succumbing to equally distracting missions, based on surveys that supposedly say we don’t want to be informed. There have been recent reports that CNN plans to fill more of its time with stories that push emotional buttons; the cable audience is fickle, and it’s fast on the zapper. As for print, a business columnist in this very paper shared with us the advice that publishers of “conventional newspapers” probably have been getting privately for some time: The only way to avoid obsolescence is for newspapers to generate more “value-added” stories--tidbits that lead readers to phone numbers where further tidbits can be doled out, for a price.

Surveys do seem to be at the bottom of all this. A woman who does newscasts on a “Morning Zoo” radio program in Kansas City recently faced a convention of broadcast news directors here. Asked by a hostile old-timer how she decides what stories to include on her broadcasts, she proudly announced that they’re chosen according to intensive audience research. In other words, people have been asked, “What don’t you know yet that you’d like us to tell you?” Anybody who pays money to ask people that question deserves to have to believe the answers.

But maybe I’m wrong, and the deep thinkers are right. Maybe the only way to hold an audience is to make it feel something.

Look at those adorable little puppies. The eyes on that one in the middle could just melt your heart.

Of course, who would have told public-opinion pollsters that we wanted more information about the revolution in Eastern Europe before it started happening? Who would tell them that we don’t know enough about Cambodia, or El Salvador, or Compton? Which of us is wise enough to specify the exact contours of our ignorance?

Wow! If that Marine doesn’t get there just in the nick of time, that little baby will tumble out of that tree.

Journalists often make charming dinner companions because they know a lot more stuff than they’re normally allowed, for reasons of taste and law, to tell us in their reports. If current trends continue, any knowledgeable newsperson will begin marketing dinners with himself to those of us who still yearn to know what’s going on.

My friend Jim is the only American held hostage by the Lebanese who has AIDS. Life, for him, is a daily struggle.

Of course, none of this would matter if we didn’t need information to make certain kinds of decisions--like, say, who should be governor, or mayor, or President. We could just vote on the basis of who makes us feel the best. Aside from hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up financial scandals and the spectacle of high government officials being convicted of felonies, that approach couldn’t hurt.

The light you read this magazine by makes you look startlingly attractive. You’ve heard this before, from the people over at the Puzzler, right? But I mean it.

The post-Watergate romantic bloom clearly is off the journalistic rose. Maybe we just have to wait for the pendulum to swing back to a time when newspeople once again want--and are allowed--to tell us something that they know and we don’t.

Meanwhile, what’s the mood here?