halvey
November 16, 2004, 02:33 PM
I thought I'd never agree with anything this anti says, but low and behold...
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http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/columnists/laura_billings/10190971.htm?1c
Americans tune out world, turn on TV gore
LAURA BILLINGS
America loves dead people.
On any given night on network television, you can usually watch a fictional character suffocate in a plastic bag, get her brains blown out, get buried alive in an underground explosion, or have his vital organs cut into wafer-thin slices by one of several forensic scientist hotties, who can talk in grim and reverential detail about all the harm that can come to a human body.
No wonder when someone important dies in real life, it's not nearly as entertaining.
This is one of several lessons we can draw from the recent firing of a CBS news producer who overrode network policy by assuming that the 16 million or so Americans watching "CSI: NY'' last Wednesday night might be interested in knowing that Yasser Arafat had died.
You can see why someone might make that mistake. After all, we had an election recently in which voters claimed that concern about terrorism was one of the central issues that had driven them to the polls. Arafat, who actually happened to be a terrorist, not to mention a Nobel Prize winner, certainly seemed like the kind of complex character Americans would want to know more about, and whose death might be worth considering for at least five minutes before the local news.
Unfortunately, Arafat's passing was not nearly as compelling as the restaurant employees killed in a multiple homicide on that night's episode, or the fun little subplot about the amputee found dead in his bed.
Irate viewers called to complain. CBS apologized. And the producer, referred to as "overly aggressive," is now looking for other opportunities.
Perhaps this producer was unaware that a Pew Research Center study in 2002 found that only 48 percent of Americans could correctly identify Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader, after the four decades his name had been in the news. Of course, it could be worse. Fewer than three in 10 Americans could correctly identify Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, even though he's been in the public eye almost as long.
So much for that resolution we made after 9/11 to pay attention to what was happening in the world.
It really was just a few years ago that Americans claimed to be more interested in foreign policy and international news. For a while, we committed ourselves to worrying about women's lives under the Taliban, and decided on a preferred spelling of al-Qaida, and listened as Madeleine Albright and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman explained world affairs on "Oprah." In a 2002 survey of 218 editors of U.S. newspapers, 95 percent of them said that readers were more interested in foreign news and 78 percent were allocating more space to world news.
But did anyone pay attention? Probably not as many as should have. Four out of 10 Americans still think Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
It's true there was an uptick of interest in foreign reporting among college-educated news consumers, who were already inclined to follow international news. But a year after 9/11, the Pew Research Center found Americans had lost their alleged appetite for world news. In fact, 65 percent of people with moderate to low interest in international news said they didn't follow it because they felt they lacked the background to make sense of it. Some 51 percent said it wasn't worth watching because "nothing ever changes."
Another 45 percent said world events "don't affect me." And 42 percent said they didn't pay much attention to world news because there was too much coverage of war and violence.
Maybe that's the reason 66 ABC affiliates decided not to run "Saving Private Ryan" on Veteran's Day last week. Realistic portrayals of the horror of war, bombs and F-bombs — even if they do happen on French soil — may be too much for our delicate sensibilities and moral values. When we want to see war and violence, we'd prefer to see it celebrated in the form of a video game such as "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," which has already sold 32 million units.
As for those poor viewers who were subjected to world news and deprived of the last five minutes of "CSI: NY," CBS gave them a rain check. TV viewers' commitment to finding out how things came out on a cop show turned the episode rebroadcast on Friday into the night's ratings winner.
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http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/columnists/laura_billings/10190971.htm?1c
Americans tune out world, turn on TV gore
LAURA BILLINGS
America loves dead people.
On any given night on network television, you can usually watch a fictional character suffocate in a plastic bag, get her brains blown out, get buried alive in an underground explosion, or have his vital organs cut into wafer-thin slices by one of several forensic scientist hotties, who can talk in grim and reverential detail about all the harm that can come to a human body.
No wonder when someone important dies in real life, it's not nearly as entertaining.
This is one of several lessons we can draw from the recent firing of a CBS news producer who overrode network policy by assuming that the 16 million or so Americans watching "CSI: NY'' last Wednesday night might be interested in knowing that Yasser Arafat had died.
You can see why someone might make that mistake. After all, we had an election recently in which voters claimed that concern about terrorism was one of the central issues that had driven them to the polls. Arafat, who actually happened to be a terrorist, not to mention a Nobel Prize winner, certainly seemed like the kind of complex character Americans would want to know more about, and whose death might be worth considering for at least five minutes before the local news.
Unfortunately, Arafat's passing was not nearly as compelling as the restaurant employees killed in a multiple homicide on that night's episode, or the fun little subplot about the amputee found dead in his bed.
Irate viewers called to complain. CBS apologized. And the producer, referred to as "overly aggressive," is now looking for other opportunities.
Perhaps this producer was unaware that a Pew Research Center study in 2002 found that only 48 percent of Americans could correctly identify Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader, after the four decades his name had been in the news. Of course, it could be worse. Fewer than three in 10 Americans could correctly identify Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, even though he's been in the public eye almost as long.
So much for that resolution we made after 9/11 to pay attention to what was happening in the world.
It really was just a few years ago that Americans claimed to be more interested in foreign policy and international news. For a while, we committed ourselves to worrying about women's lives under the Taliban, and decided on a preferred spelling of al-Qaida, and listened as Madeleine Albright and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman explained world affairs on "Oprah." In a 2002 survey of 218 editors of U.S. newspapers, 95 percent of them said that readers were more interested in foreign news and 78 percent were allocating more space to world news.
But did anyone pay attention? Probably not as many as should have. Four out of 10 Americans still think Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
It's true there was an uptick of interest in foreign reporting among college-educated news consumers, who were already inclined to follow international news. But a year after 9/11, the Pew Research Center found Americans had lost their alleged appetite for world news. In fact, 65 percent of people with moderate to low interest in international news said they didn't follow it because they felt they lacked the background to make sense of it. Some 51 percent said it wasn't worth watching because "nothing ever changes."
Another 45 percent said world events "don't affect me." And 42 percent said they didn't pay much attention to world news because there was too much coverage of war and violence.
Maybe that's the reason 66 ABC affiliates decided not to run "Saving Private Ryan" on Veteran's Day last week. Realistic portrayals of the horror of war, bombs and F-bombs — even if they do happen on French soil — may be too much for our delicate sensibilities and moral values. When we want to see war and violence, we'd prefer to see it celebrated in the form of a video game such as "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," which has already sold 32 million units.
As for those poor viewers who were subjected to world news and deprived of the last five minutes of "CSI: NY," CBS gave them a rain check. TV viewers' commitment to finding out how things came out on a cop show turned the episode rebroadcast on Friday into the night's ratings winner.