I don't know about the Nancy Grace bashing either. A dead fiancee' is a big deal in anyone's life. There are those that don't find that type of happiness again. It is good of her to still call on his life and the fact she still moarns for him 27 years later. However, she should realize the 'content' of her program is a reaction to others and not necessarily a tribute to a long lost love. She might need to work on her approach to honoring him rather than seeing him as a promotion to her cause. At any rate this article in the L.A. Times contextualizes 'the view' at and about cable news. I appreciated the effort put forward here. Thank you.
Regarding Media
Cable's fall from Grace
March 4, 2006
From serious to desperate
For people who think serious journalism is to be valued, this has been a melancholy week, marked by the passing from the scene of two authentic visionaries. One was The Times' former publisher, Otis Chandler — who, along with two equally visionary editors, Nick Williams Sr. and Bill Thomas — transformed this paper into one of international standing and showed print journalism the way forward in an era increasingly saturated with television. The other was CNN founder Ted Turner, who finally quit Time Warner's board in disgust, severing all ties to the cable news operations he virtually willed into being in the face of universal skepticism and outright scorn.
Turner has a loose lip and an unsteady personality, but he never wavered in his belief that serious news has a place on television. The same cannot be said of the corporate apparatchiks now running CNN and CNN Headline and cringing before Fox News' success. They're the ones who have unleashed Grace on their Headline network and defaced CNN's regular report with things like Jack Cafferty's bizarre and incoherently histrionic intrusions into the afternoon news and the increasingly demagogic Lou Dobbs' second rate imitations of a Howard Beale rant.
These desperate acts have been triggered by CNN's inability to come even close to matching Fox in the ratings. The commercial genius of Rupert Murdoch's network, of course, resides in Roger Ailes' intuition that the talk radio model could be transferred to television, thereby avoiding the expense of real reporting while cultivating viewers with a taste for conservative partisanship and, more important, entertainment. Murdoch and his accomplices clearly understand that one of the more disturbing characteristics of the current cultural moment is the insistence of so many people that they have an unalienable right to be entertained during their every waking moment, no matter what they're doing. (It's probably only a matter of time until patients require that their heart surgeons tap dance into the operating room.)
We verge these days on becoming a trivial people.
In a talk to a college audience in Oregon this week, former CNN anchor Aaron Brown mused that cable news has proceeded from promise to decadence because "it is only giving consumers what they want." According to the Ashland Mail Tribune's account of his remarks, Brown said that "CNN spent a fortune covering the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. After two weeks, ratings fell to normal levels. The Fox news channel channeled their dollars into a story about American teenager Natalee Holloway disappearing in Aruba. Fox, of course, cleaned up in ratings and revenue."
Thus, we have Nancy Grace, indefatigable pursuer of missing white women and "host" of a show that — over the past year — has boosted CNN Headline's audience in her time slot by 181% to just over 600,000. That's still roughly 1.5 million fewer viewers than O'Reilly has for cable news' top-rated show.
The conventional response to all this is simply to shrug and attribute it all to the irrepressible venality of frightened corporate executives. The problem there is that you can't have opportunists without opportunity.
Brown put his finger on the responsibility for creating that opportunity this week, when he said, "In the perfect democracy that I believe TV news is, it's not enough to say you want serious news. You have to watch it."
Let's do something really entertaining. Let's imagine that the real — well, really fictional — Howard Beale were presented with Grace, O'Reilly and the whole wretchedly dispiriting direction of cable news. It's hard to envision him saying anything, except:
"I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell:
"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"
