As Paddy Chayevsky warned in the script for the astonishingly-prescient film NETWORK, in 1976 mind you, the first hard shove toward the complete downfall of media journalism came when news organizations were placed under the entertainment banner and became responsible not for solid reporting but ratings.
By now news in TV jargon is a fiction genre like mystery, science fiction, or reality. We all seem to know reality shows are not “real” in any real sense. Another term for them is “unscripted”, another outright lie. They are indeed scripted, it’s just that no writer gets credit or pay. They’re also manipulated in editing so much that participants find out who the villains and heroes are only once the show airs.
In the news genre, they now feel free to alter images, sounds, and so on in order to “tell the story”. What story? The useful story. The one useful to the owners, approved, sanctioned, vetted by lawyers and spin doctors, and reviewed by owners. That story. Nothing to do with fact. News shows present fiction to persuade us toward one or another view of our world.
They impose a narrative. That’s the phrase. The TV news presenters read copy carefully written to accomplish certain specific goals. It carefully excises and excludes various glimpses, views, and attitudes. It stringently adheres to an agenda set by top management. Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and that ilk are not the only ones; all network news shows run this way.
Reporters are embedded not so much in military units anymore but in corporate heirarchy. They exist to make profit and push propaganda favoring the parent company. That is all.
When you watch TV news remember, you are viewing a cartoon. You’re watching a half-hour (another lie, it’s down to maybe 15 minutes in some markets) fantasy, a commercial for corporate America. Seriously.
During the first Gulf War — remember Stormin’ Norman, PATRIOT missiles, and the SCUD stud? — my friend Daniel Waltimire made an insightful observation. While watching TV coverage of the invasion, he realized those clips of PATRIOT missiles launching and shooting down SCUD missiles mid-air, thus saving our brave consumers of MREs, those clips included sounds, and when we saw the explosion in the dark sky we’d hear a big kaboom. “Where’s the doppler effect? Sight travels faster than sound. We should see the flash, then hear the boom a few seconds later if it’s as far down range as they’re claiming.”
He saw through the lies that easily, using the liars’ own “evidence”. He did this with a High School-level understanding of physics. Later, during the bombardment of Baghdad by our brave F-117 bombers, (unless it rained, then they could not be flown…), we noticed a few technical glitches that led us to realize reporters ostensibly in the infamous hotel where most Western journalists stayed were actually faking reports, both by pretending to be under fire when not, and also sometimes by using blue/green screen outright SFX fakery; they were not always even in Iraq.
This is satirized to this day by Jon Stewart on THE DAILY SHOW, where he pretends to talk to a reporter in some far-flung locale, only to reveal as the camera pans back a wide shot showing the reporter standing a few feet away in front of a rear-projection screen.
This literally happened during the Gulf War and we got to see it a few times thanks to glitches at local level, when they failed to cut away from the network’s live signal feed. During those down times, the actors, (they are not reporters, they just play them on TV), would relax, joke, and once even said, “Jesus, do you think they’re buying this bullshit? It was all I could do to keep from busting out laughing.” (I saw that one. Appalling. I believe it was ABC airing that particular moment of idiocy.)
Still later, once Baghdad was “secured”, the cameras roamed the city showing carnage. Trouble was, it was often the same bloody victims depicted in different scenes. In one, a shell had been wedged into a crack in a wall and little kids were laying as if killed, blood all over. Sad, pathetic. Except of course the shell was intact, not exploded, and the rubble did not match the surrounding wall, and the kids appeared in several such shots from widely-separated scenes. It was all staged. Faked by paid urchins, who no doubt got a great laugh and a few dollars for being in American movies.
That is literally how cynical it is.
Yes, Mt. Suribachi was faked; the iconic picture of the brave soldiers making sure our glorious flag is raised on the highest hill during that battle, later made into the wonderful sculpture so it could become a monument to inspire more people to volunteer to be cannon fodder for the corporate profiteers, all that was staged. Oh, it seems really to have happened, but no one got a picture of it, nor knows who really participated. What is known? After the battle, a group of soldiers was dragooned into posing for the camera. They selected the group so representatives of all the racial and ethnic types available were represented. This is, after all, American melting pot war propaganda, so inclusion was important back then.
How things have changed.
What I’m saying is, faking heroic imagery is nothing new. Nor is lying about war. Julius Caesar reported killing more Gauls and Celts than he ever encountered as he wandered the Germanic woods. He pulled a Westmoreland, as we later did in Viet Nam, by counting every body part as a full kill. War is always a crime, Hemingway observed; war crimes are always lied about.
By now, it’s not just war, it is everything. Yes, newspapers were always rich men getting their view across, persuading a public so they could benefit. Sure, we all know that, right? Now it’s TV news-like shows. They’re at the same level as a SCOOBY-DOO cartoon or an episode of BIG BANG THEORY, except they play with reality a bit more directly, pretending to give us a clear, “fair and balanced” view of our world.
In fact, all they show is a mad illusion of reality based on corporate needs.
Well, my 15 minutes are up. See you on TV.
/// /// ///
