TV News Our Town Commons During Crisis

To turn on one of the commercial television networks or listen to AM radio in the week that followed Sept. 11 was a positively disorienting experience, not only because the very heart of America was under siege, but because the broadcast media had been so utterly transformed. Instead of relegating “the news” to its usual ghettoized places in programming, broadcast media outlets gave “the story” serious, thoughtful and undivided attention. After years of being de-emphasized, even debased, America’s broadcast media managed for a dazzling moment to escape the confinement of pressures to which it has been increasingly subject by market surveys, ratings wars, commercialization, competitive pandering to the lowest common denominator and a corporate fixation on the bottom line.

That it took a national tragedy of such epic proportions to shake the broadcast media loose from its market servitude and allow it to perform so commendably is disheartening, but nonetheless revelatory. To turn on one’s television set over the past few days was to enter a virgin world in which reporters and anchors, once so confined, now roamed with seeming impunity across the divides that only days before had marked the geography of the broadcast spectrum. Suddenly gone were the arbitrary programmatic partitions that used to mark every hour and half hour; the immutable divisions of sound-bitten news stories; the 10-to 12-minute “segments” that have long characterized magazine format “news shows”; and the intrusiveness of commercials that slice so relentlessly into commercial television and radio programming and reduce its nutritional weight to that of junk food.

Accustomed to a wasteland of ephemeral programming, it has been almost disorienting, but, of course, gratifying, to find anchors relieved of the burdens of “happy talk news”; producers liberated from having to assign fluffy stories calculated to get “better demographics”; and reporters unconstrained by too little time, too few resources and endless worries that complex stories may win the censure of “the suits” by causing their outlet to lose audience to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

Watching journalists being given the space to do what they love to do most--go after “the story” in a conscientious, dignified, and thorough manner--left us as viewers feeling astounded at what could be done when the old prevailing forces of media gravity, which have kept everything so commercially earthbound and to which we have slowly become inured, were miraculously suspended. What a relief it has been in this time of incomparable horror and sadness to be, however briefly, liberated from this oppressive ancien regime.

The only time in my life when I have witnessed a comparable media transformation was during the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square when, for a short period in late May of 1989, the Chinese media slipped the harness of official Party censorship and became a virtually free press. It was an intoxicating experience not only for the journalists who participated in this rebirth of a few short days, but for viewers and readers as well who, for the first time in their lives, were dealt with in a truthful and dignified manner by their media.

This is not to say that American broadcasters have been without failings. One waited in vain for any real discussion of how, after the most impressive period of global economic expansion in history, the world has come to be wracked by so much paralyzing global anger and hatred toward the U.S. Where were the voices analyzing how the miracle of “globalization” seems to have turned spaceship earth not into a global community of rising expectations, but into badly divided camps of winners and losers? Where was a convincing discussion of why Islamic fundamentalists are so hostile to all of our vaunted entrepreneurial notions of “progress,” “winning,” “being #1.” Why the resentment of America unilaterally appointing itself as the world’s peace keeper?

The retreat to file footage when it came to covering such places as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia was a reminder of how the commercial networks have largely amputated their international news operations. Despite the fact that the world is ever more global, the networks have become ever more parochial in their scope and coverage.

Nonetheless, what is worth noting is how quickly we as citizens have become accustomed to the new, if fleeting, dignity these dire circumstances have suddenly conferred on the whole enterprise of our broadcast media. Indeed, when commercials began slowly to be re-introduced and normal programming began to stage its inevitable counter-attack last week, it was not difficult to feel as if some corrupt tyrant was strong-arming its way back onto the throne and that we “consumers of content” were once again fated to be grounded by the surly bonds of commercial earth.

Given the magnitude of the national tragedy, it was perhaps not surprising that Americans experienced one of the most intense feelings of community within memory. While it is true that such tragedy can bring a nation together like nothing else, it is also true that such togetherness can only be cultured in some sort of commons. Broadcast news was our nation’s commons during this time of hideous tragedy. Indeed, the first night after the bombings, ABC’s Peter Jennings referred to television as something like the “campfires” of old which we used to gather around. And, in this case he and his fellow newsmen served our electronic campfire well. They helped inform and calm us so that we could keep some part of our critical faculties in abeyance, to think reasonably about what had befallen us. The result has been an unprecedented sense of togetherness and common purpose for which we owe a profound debt of thanks to television and radio. But above all, what has flickered forth from our screens has been a reminder of what the media can be and can do if it is encouraged to keep an eye more on the public’s need to know than on ratings.

What conclusions can we draw from this crucible? Perhaps this: Broadcast journalists, indeed most journalists, have not been able to practice their craft as they learned it because of the inescapable fact that commercial media outlets are held as private rather than public trusts whose primary imperative is profit and shareholder value rather than good journalism. This is not to revile business, but simply to point out that there is a contradiction at the heart of our whole media proposition between the public’s right and need to know and a media corporation’s need to maximize profits. This is an irreconcilable contradiction for which we as a nation not only have no alternative institutional answer, but hardly even have the question.

So, what better time, when our media is still able to play hooky a while longer from bottom-line considerations, to pose a few questions? Is it not time to begin considering whether or not a far larger share of the U.S. broadcast media--besides PBS and NPR-should be held in some sort of public trust? After all, are not the public airwaves public? If this is still true, how is it that they have eluded their responsibility to better serve as vectors of public information? And at the very least, could these airwaves not be sold, licensed, or leased in a manner that would adequately fund a more robust and independent construct of public broadcasting, one that would be able to continue the kind of first-rate reporting and global news coverage that we have witnessed of late?

Americans are fundamentally an optimistic people who pride themselves in looking forward even during the darkest times. We have seen our media shine...for one brief moment. From this experience perhaps there is one positive lesson that we can extract from what has otherwise been a depressing and troubling national tragedy.