According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)It is a little surprising to me that at this point in the year the networks have devoted less than an hour to reporting on the Iraq War (the fact that I get virtually zero of my news from the evening news notwithstanding). It is very surprising to me, however, that reporters are having trouble getting their stories out. I mean, I understand that 22 minutes is not a lot of time, but it's not as though television is the only possible outlet for news. There is an invention called the internet which allows limitless content to be delivered to the viewer--why not have the reporters make their stories available online?
The thing is, you hear a lot about how the internet is causing old media to go extinct--TV news divisions are whithering, newspapers are folding or reducing staff--but what hasn't changed is the real value of original news reporting. Without reporters out in the world writing stories and giving first-person accounts, there would be no news content to blog about or analyze endlessly on television. Reporting is still the fuel that runs the news-media engine. And so I think that not distributing these news stories--if not on TV, then on the internet somehow--amounts to throwing away something valuable for no good reason.
One innovative thing TV news organizations could do is start posting their reports on YouTube and embedding advertisements into the video itself to raise revenue. That way, the video would be searchable and easily embeddable in in the blogs, and gain far more exposure than if it sat on some little-visited proprietary news site somewhere.
Another thing the news organizations could do is start desanitizing their war reporting. As it is now, there is a general aversion to showing real violence and blood and gore--especially when it is American soldiers who are bearing the brunt of it. The genteel standards of evening TV news--and TV news in general--forbids much of this, but I think the same limitations do not apply on the internet (you could simply have a disclaimer that warned the viewer of graphic content). So you could have really gritty, real reporting, with people cursing and dying and everything.
I would add also that it's not just the genteel standards of TV that bar a lot of the grittier coverage of the war--there is also the residual effect of the pseudo-patriotic self-censoring mode that causes the media to suppress "negative" images of the war. When was the last time we saw a casket on television? The last time we saw a dead American soldier? This is a war, no? These things do happen, right? Maybe one reason people aren't very interested in the war coverage is because the war coverage typically omits the most important and visceral part of the story.
PS: It's kind of interesting to note that much of the substance for this NYT story comes from an interview on the Daily Show. Indeed, the Daily Show interview is so central to the article that it seems if it weren't for the Daily Show, the article never would have been written. I'm not sure if this means that the Times sucks or that Jon Stewart is awesome.
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