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For Rich, News Is Poorer
At Yale, Times columnist argues that information, entertainment have become indistinguishable
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Business New Haven
2/19/2001
By: BNH
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T0he culture and values of the entertainment industry have infected American news media to the point where it's difficult to tell one from the other.
So says author and New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who visited Yale February 8 as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism. Rich delivered the annual Gary Fryer Memorial Lecture on the topic “Journalism Unplugged: The Triumph of 24/7 Media.” The talk took place in the lecture hall of the Yale University Art Gallery. About 150 members of the Yale community and the public attended the free talk.
News and entertainment have merged, Rich argued, to such an extent that newsmakers like U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and celebrities like Jennifer Lopez become equally prominent in the news media and attract similar “face time” on television and in magazines and newspapers.
“News and entertainment have merged,” said Rich. Part of the reason is that many of the nation's largest news organizations, especially network TV news divisions, “have been swallowed up by entertainment conglomerates” - ABC by Disney, CBS by Viacom, and so forth
“When a news organization becomes part of an entertainment company, its values change,” Rich said. Thus traditional news values such as objectivity, perspective and fairness take a back seat to drama, action, glamour, celebrity and sex appeal.
Rich has been a columnist on the op-ed page of Times since 1994. Before that Rich was the Times' chief drama critic since 1980 - the “most feared man on Broadway” for his ability to close a show after a single performance with a negative review. During the presidential campaign year of 1992, Rich joined Times Washington reporter (and now fellow columnist) Maureen Dowd to write a daily column at the political conventions.
From World War II until 1990, Rich argued, the Cold War anchored the American media conversation and created a predictable us-vs.-them context for national and international news. After the Berlin Wall fell, he said, the media - especially network TV - took to generating a never-ending parade of what he called “mediathons” to attract and keep the attention of an audience increasingly fragmented by cable TV. In a world where the threat of instant nuclear immolation had seemingly vanished overnight, Rich said the media replaced the Cold War drama with a new news culture that emphasized “all calamity all the time.”
It's 1991 Gulf War coverage transformed Ted Turner's CNN from failing experiment to major media player for its “ownership” of the conflict. The O.J. Simpson trial followed, adding elements of celebrity, sensationalism and sex - and American viewers stayed glued to their sets through months of mainly humdrum testimony.
Coverage of the death of Princess Diana, said Rich, “went on for days with literally no news” being generated - and introduced an element of fiction to the media coverage which, by the time it finally subsided, was portraying the princess as “the Mother Teresa of England.”
For the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Rich said, the media created “a whole fictional character” to represent the former White House intern, of which they knew little and who in any event wasn't talking.
A similar fiction underscored the George W. Bush cocaine rumors that had a good two-month run during last year's Presidential campaign. “No one, not even here at Yale, ever said they witnessed George W. Bush with cocaine,” Rich said. “There literally was no accuser.”
But hey - it made good copy while it lasted.
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