Do News Outlets Need All Those Talking Heads?
Last night, I first tuned to PBS to watch the final night of the Democratic National Convention. While the official speakers were talking inaudibly in the background, the PBS anchors introduced the same panel of commentators, poised to make the same lukewarm observations, as we saw on previous nights. (I complained about David Brooks’ mouth sounds in Tuesday’s forum.) Before they could start blathering, however, the anchors cut away to a reporter on the floor, to ask her what the mood was among the delegates. Questions about mood are as lazy as they are common, sadly, but journalists keep asking them. I wanted to hear who was speaking at the actual convention, instead of the meta-convention within the PBS booth, so I switched to C-SPAN.
At that moment, the Central Park Five were on stage. It was a powerful moment. The people who were wrongly convicted of rape and imprisoned for between 6 and 13 years reminded us that Donald Trump was at the head of the mob, with his infamous full-page ad demanding that they be tried and executed for a crime that they did not commit. Yusef Salaam, now a city councilman in New York, pointed the finger at Trump: “That guy says he still stands by the original guilty verdict. He dismisses the scientific evidence, rather than admit he was wrong. He has never changed, and he never will.”
There were equally meaningful moments from last night’s agenda. People whose loved ones were murdered with guns, and Gabbie Giffords, who barely survived being killed by a gunman. Chris Swanson, the Michigan sheriff who defused a protest on behalf of George Floyd by marching with the protesters. Courtney Baldwin, a former sex slave trafficked through the web site Backpage, which Kamala Harris prosecuted.
Chances are, if I had kept watching PBS, I would have missed at least some of these moments, since PBS regularly cut away from speakers during the convention. Sure, I didn’t get to hear Amy Walter tell me how Kamala Harris needed to appeal to cynical voters who doubt she is strong enough to be president, or Jonathan Capeheart remind me that the war in Gaza is a fraught issue, or David Brooks observe that gun control might find more support if Democrats are “respectful of rural America,” but I don’t feel deprived.
Which makes me wonder, what is the benefit to news outlets to having the commentariat constantly shoving their heads in front of the news? Does it help sell papers or attract viewers? Speaking only for myself, I didn’t need someone to obstruct the view of the Central Park Five, or summarize what they said, or tell me how I should feel about their moment at the DNC. Talking heads at moments like these are akin to the music you hear while on hold waiting to get to a customer support representative, noise that I don’t want interposed between me and the useful information I do want. Even worse, they’re like the giddy messages that break into the hold muzak, never telling me anything useful.
Just as no one buys an iPhone for the hold muzak while waiting for Apple technical support, no one buys The Washington Post to read Matt Bai, Michele Norris, or David Von Drehle. And yet, the Post featured a conversation among the three of them about Harris’ acceptance speech, which included various fact-free musings (“But I wonder whether the Democrats missed a chance to make more overt outreach to the Latino diaspora.”), repetition of what the candidate said (“Her closing argument focused on her competency and Trump’s contempt for democracy and American norms.”), and recitations of the blazingly obvious (“One thing that had struck me throughout the convention is the running threads of empathy and joy.”). Even worse was the Post’s utterly vacuous live chat from 10 columnists. I struggled and failed to find the link to it, even though I read it this morning. Which, if you think about it, is a good metaphor for most commentary: so vaporous that it disappears from memory almost immediately.
Do networks and newspapers think that they’re doing a public service by providing this commentary? It’s not as though opinion writers serve no useful purpose. At times, they can shine a light on something that we’ve otherwise missed. Lately, John Oliver does a good job of this, deliberately choosing off-the-beaten-track topics like hospice care, dollar stores, and McKinsey & Company for his half-comedic, half-serious longform treatment.
Commentators can also give us a very different point of view than received wisdom from other sources, or our own opinions. Christopher Hitchens, for example, was a great contrarian, willing to poke holes in the hagiography around icons like Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill. But these are the exceptions to the kind of highly predictable, not terribly challenging, and entirely forgettable commentary that fills big sections of news outlets like gravel and mulch.
The other obvious explanation, of course, is that commentary is a form of political leverage. Unflattering columns are inexpensive and easy to produce, relative to their potential impact (versus, say, investigative journalism). But the amount of leverage produced may be overstated. When was the last time that a newspaper’s endorsement had a substantial impact on an election? Did The New York Times convince Biden to drop out of the race, or did the people around him help him reach that conclusion? Is there any columnist today with the influence of a Walter Lippmann, Molly Ivins, H.L. Mencken, or even an Art Buchwald?
It’s entirely possible that there is no good argument for the amount of commentary that fills broadcast and written journalism. 24 hour news outlets are in a special category: given the constant need to fill their schedules, why not pack them full of cheap speculation? But outlets like PBS and The Washington Post don’t have the same compulsion. They can aggressively prune the amount of opinion without anyone really even noticing. No one will cancel their subscriptions to the Post if you don’t have as many people making observations such as, “Many voters were resisting Biden’s reelection not on policy grounds but simply because they thought he was too old.”
Companies often struggle with products that still exist in their portfolios, but don’t really have a strong justification for sustaining them. Sometimes, the psychic investment in making products successful is hard to overcome. Factions within the company may have strongly differing opinions on the continued importance of the product — and, of course, the people in that product group argue strongly in favor for its continuation. But it’s up to every organization to regularly ask the question, Do we still need all this? As a consumer of the news, I certainly don’t.
No. They don’t.
I just want to note that this Democrat spent his most recent weekend with a bunch of his cousins, a fairly large fraction of which live in rural states. Hell, I grew up in a (very unusual, I’ll admit) rural place.
One summer, maybe 10 years ago, I was in Custer, SD visiting a cousin. I got some stuff at the grocery store and lo and behold, the checker was a young black woman. I thought this noteworthy, and immediately tried to strategize about how I might explore this further. I ventured, “It’s great that you’re here, but I’m curious as to how you got to be here.”
She smiled (big relief for me), and said, “Oh, I just graduated from college in Atlanta, and there was an ad in the paper.”
I replied, “That’s fantastic!” And that was the end of that conversation.
I wish some of my white urban friends were a bit more like that young black woman.
I became cynical about TV commentators when MSNBC phoned me up one day to see if I’d like to go on-air. I don’t even recall the issue. I think they must have found my name off a piece I wrote criticizing pundits as a TV reviewer in a local paper, but I don’t know.
I declined on the grounds that I was not an expert on, well, anything. I did not inform them that my name wasn’t actually the name they called me, as I was a fugitive at the time. But had I not been on the run and using an alias I could have been the guy spouting platitudes for fun and profit.
Kingdaddy, I couldn’t have said this better myself. I certainly agree with you completely. I guess performing actual newsgathering and reporting is a stale old activity, while endlessly, obsessively “analyzing” what actual newsmakers do or say is the hot new trend.
Harumph!
I’ve occasionally bitched here abut the print side of this, that NYT and WAPO no longer report news, they write long essays about the news. For on air convention coverage, I’d have thought it would be cheaper to just show the speakers without paying commentator’s. In print, it seems like there’s a feeling reporting is expensive and they should milk a couple column inches out of every bit of trivia they happened on.
@MWLib:
The problem with investigative journalism is that it’s (a) slow and (b) expensive. Neither of those fits easily into current on-demand news, which requires lots of cheap, constant content.
One of the big problems is the collapse of news advertising revenue. That funding allowed newspapers and, to a lesser degree, TV news, from doing in-depth investigative reporting. It also helped them “perform” the firewall between advertising and editorial more easily.
There is a reason we watched the DNC on C-Span
I agree with all this. I watched all four nights on the DNC’s YouTube channel. No additional commentary whatsoever.
We noticed every time there was something going on on the stage that wasn’t a single speaker – drum line, high school team, etc. – the camera crew made it very clear that they had no idea how to film anything other than a single speaker.
Talking heads on video screens are seemingly incapable of reporting news without injecting their banal opinions.
It’s the essence of corporate America. They’re trying to convince the largest flock of eyeballs that they have superior bullshit.
@JohnMc: Additionally, their business is not really presenting the DNC or RNC, it’s reporting their impressions of the event. In my more cynical musings, I speculate about the possibility that their interest may well be distracting you from the fact that the Central Park Five and Courtney Baldwin are there to keep you from remembering the role that governments played/failed to play in events such as these.
I missed David Brooks explaining how rural people feel? I will never forgive myself.
I guarantee that the Democrats missed a chance to make a more overt outreach to the Latino diaspora. There were no giant banners that said “we love the Latino diaspora,” for instance. And it could be more overt than that if they wrote it in Spanish, or “en español” as the Spanish say.
And if they really want to know the mood of the delegates, I think the right way to do it is to distribute mood rings with wifi connections, so they can get immediate feedback. Or maybe just those Oura rings that can monitor body temperature and heart rate and a bunch of other health related statistics. A graph of average delegate pulse rates, perhaps broken down by state, gender and ethnic group, being updated in real time during speeches would be amazing.
Watched talking-head free through AP news.
@JohnMc:
IMO it’s just a money issue. “News” has never been profitable. Turner barely broke even and did that well because of the occasional big jump in viewership when something big happened. The people that paid Turner a billion for CNN had a big debt to pay though. The tried journalism for a bit…and then went full bore on political gossip.
I did all my watching on the computer, watching youtubes.
Sometimes C-Span youtube feeds, more often just the DNC youtube feeds.
There are also youtube feeds from all the networks and some local stations, but I stuck to DNC and C-Span.
@Matt Bernius:
Agreed, but what’s PBS’s excuse? David Brooks hasn’t said anything insightful since about 1983, though he does make an effective GOP fifth columnist.
@DrDaveT: I’ve noted a couple Brooks articles in recent months about connection and emotional intelligence. For people that don’t have that natural ability (and I don’t, and I suspect most of his conservative readership don’t), I think those columns have been worthwhile. I believe they are excerpted from a book of his.
But as for his political opinions, um yeah …
You do realize such liberals as infinite-year Republican senator Chuck Hagel, the head of the National Restaurant Association, the head of corporate strategy of Comcast, and the chief counsel for international law firm Haynes&Boone are on the PBS board of directors, right?
If you aren’t aware of the meaning of “people are policy” …. Do you really think two guys named Greg or Kevin are going to look Chuck Hagel in the eye and tell him to get stuffed when he proposes to soft-pedal XYZ Democratic policy platform or to spin yarns rather than cover objective reality about someone named AOC? The answer is no, they’re not.
PBS is at minimum conservative leaning, at best it’s another NPR — whose abbreviation is “nice polite Republicans” for good reason.
News channels are ALL conservative. Every one of them.. because as Noam Chomsky pointed out, the people staffing the news desk are only hired if they’re willing to be sycophantic.
When you truly accept this, you don’t have an emotion when David Brooks is trotted out.
Aside from it being cheaper compared to actual reporting, so you as a news organization can make it look like you’re doing something in response to a big news event, I suspect it’s an ego thing, on the part of the news organization and the pundits. Because people must want them to opine on whatever the topic of the day is, and provide incisive commentary, right?
Seriously, I have no idea who Maureen Down or David Brooks or Tom Friedman are for, although the latter has been not completely useless on the Gaza occupation. But I’m not sure being useful once a decade warrants how much ever money he makes from punditing.
@Franklin:
Being a Republican columnist got awkward after Trump. Brooks started doing a lot of pop sociology and psychology to avoid politics
@DrDaveT:
PBS (versus NPR) had always been a talking heads format. I cannot remember them ever having an investigative arm.
Stop Making Sense.
😉
@Michael Reynolds:
When trying to avoid the gaze of the Powers That Be, and/or bad tempered “investors”, TV interviews are probably best avoided.
😉
What role did public figures like Donald Trump play in shaping the narrative around the Central Park Five case?