Rich Byrne writes on Al Gore’s new book critiquing newsertainment and Gore’s own history facilitating the current state of affairs:
Gore’s book rehearses the well-known factors in the decline of TV news: runaway conglomeration, slashed news budgets and sharp profit incentives for news divisions to drown out the serious with titillation and slapstick.
But how precisely did it get this way? It’s been a long slow slide, to be sure, but the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – in which Gore was a key player as Bill Clinton’s vice president – has accelerated the very problems Gore bemoans in _The Assault on Reason_.
… it’s an inconvenient truth for Gore that this overhaul of US media law narrowed consumer news choices and curbed the public accountability of broadcasters. In a review of the legislation’s fallout in 2005, the advocacy group Common Cause noted that the law created “more media concentration, less diversity and higher prices”. …
… The new law increased the license period granted to broadcasters from five years to eight years and it significantly raised the bar required to successfully challenge license renewals. This double whammy effectively blunted one of the only tools available to ordinary citizens to hold media accountable.
The effects are already there to see. Recent studies have shown that local broadcast coverage of politics has been largely obliterated, with many broadcast news stations virtually ignoring regional congressional elections. … So it’s no surprise that Gore prefers to ping the soft target of celebrity. Nor is it surprising that his critics in the media prefer to keep the discussion on Gore v Britney.
{ 28 comments }
Doubting Thomas 05.31.07 at 11:29 pm
I’m confused as to why this means anything. Gore wasn’t the President in 1996, Clinton was.
Stuart 06.01.07 at 12:23 am
I would have thought the decline of TV news is more related to TV companies being squeezed by declining ad revenues due to the increase in use of DVRs and the wholesale movement towards advertising on the internet more than anything. Are you really able to tease out effects of legalislative change being positive or negative with that going on in the background?
de Selby 06.01.07 at 12:31 am
I take Gore’s reluctance to admit his role in enabling the most horrid results of the 1996 Telecom Act as a sign that he’s still mulling a Presidential run – You don’t kick off a campaign by saying “I really screwed up on one of my two signature issues when I was VP.”
On the other hand, I think he is smart enough to see the error of his ways, especially because one of his private ventures, Current TV, lives in a shadow land between what is and what might have been, had that law been different. Unfortunately, this financial interest is another constraint on his ability to speak forthrightly to the issue.
As Byrne’s piece shows, he is vulnerable from both the left and the right in this area. I imagine that it plays a pretty big part in his calculation as to whether or not to run, and even if he were to run and win, he’s damaged goods in terms of political leverage on telecom issues.
It’s really too bad, the Perfect hammering the Good this way. I suppose Clinton or Giulliani will be ever so much better.
Antti Nannimus 06.01.07 at 12:53 am
Hi,
>”It’s been a long slow slide, to be sure, but the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – in which Gore was a key player as Bill Clinton’s vice president – has accelerated the very problems Gore bemoans in The Assault on Reason.”
So it’s a damn good thing he ain’t the president now, eh?
Have a nice day,
Antti
vivian 06.01.07 at 1:02 am
The decline in (US) news standards full stop, including television, started well before 1996. It’s driven by budget priorities, the idea that each division has to be as profitable as possible, not merely profitable, let alone subsidized. Why keep bureaus in major cities around the world when the wire service or the other countries will sell it cheaper? Why work on stories thoroughly when your peers are more interested in who mentioned it first than whether the first mention was accurate?
This 1990’s walmart-myth of doing more with less certainly propagated into telecom business, and certainly the news business was not improved by media concentration. But it’s just stupid and intellectually lazy to blame Gore for the whole mess. Was there something positive you thought we should get from this Guardian comment that I’ve (we’ve) missed?
Functional 06.01.07 at 1:14 am
Recent studies have shown that local broadcast coverage of politics has been largely obliterated, with many broadcast news stations virtually ignoring regional congressional elections
You take this seriously? This is an empirical claim, but it doesn’t occur to you to ask whether this has anything to do with media consolidation or the 96 Telecom Act?
The linked “study” found that:
Fifty-five percent of the broadcasts captured contained a presidential story. By contrast, just eight percent of those broadcasts contained a story about a local candidate race, which includes campaigns for the U.S. House, state senate or assembly, mayor or city council seat, judgeship, law enforcement posts, education-related offices, and regional and county offices. Eight times more coverage went to stories about accidental injuries, and 12 times more coverage to sports and weather, than to coverage of all local races combined.
But there’s absolutely nothing in the study that indicates what caused this trend in coverage. Might I suggest that rather than blaming Gore and the 96 Telecom Act, we should blame the fact that TV as a medium is geared towards selling sexy and dramatic stories, not the boring horserace of local politics?
Eric H 06.01.07 at 2:42 am
“this overhaul of US media law narrowed consumer news choices ”
Perhaps there are declining news budgets because of something besides that law? Something that has vastly expanded access to news coverage through a nearly free medium (quite the opposite of Common Cause’s claim of “higher prices”)? I’ll second vivian and functional: there was plenty wrong with that law, and plenty Al Gore should answer for, but this article is laying far too much blame on the wrong perpetrator.
Jon 06.01.07 at 2:46 am
The press lavishes too much attention on celebrity culture and thus neglects weightier issues.
But all these things have been true since before the American Revolution, so they can’t be incompatible with democracy. I see no evidence it’s getting worse.
The effects are already there to see. Recent studies have shown that local broadcast coverage of politics has been largely obliterated, with many broadcast news stations virtually ignoring regional congressional elections.
There hasn’t been anything going on in that same timeframe, has there? Rise of online news and blogs? I know I went from a regular viewer to getting my news largely by Internet in the 90s.
Kimmitt 06.01.07 at 3:55 am
The Clinton Rules were in effect long before 1996.
bad Jim 06.01.07 at 5:21 am
Folks, the Fairness Doctrine passed into history in 1987. The 1996 act did us no favors, but we’ve been skidding down the slippery slope of the “Vast Wasteland” for quite some time and we’re still gathering speed.
People who get their news from TV believe that crime is on the rise. They believed that back in the 60’s and 70’s when it was true, and they continue to believe it though it’s been false for a decade or two. Gore mentions this in his book, perhaps too briefly. The media don’t actually need help from the administration to push this or any other theme that boosts ratings.
Nevertheless, a threat from the Beyond, like terrorism, is like crack to the media, immediately addictive, impossible to put down. A war is a way to intensify and prolong the rush, or the ratings, but it isn’t fun for more than a year or two, after which it’s just another nasty high-maintenance habit.
It’s almost encouraging that we are free again to obsess over Britney’s twinkie, Edwards’ haircuts or Gore’s girth. (He did look rather jowly in his interview with Gwen Ifill.)
sd 06.01.07 at 5:24 am
This is almsot laugh-out-loud funny:
“… The new law increased the license period granted to broadcasters from five years to eight years and it significantly raised the bar required to successfully challenge license renewals. This double whammy effectively blunted one of the only tools available to ordinary citizens to hold media accountable.”
As if the primary concern of station owners were licence renewal (which even under the old laws was nearly automatic) as opposed to, oh, I don’t know, RATINGS.
Media outlets are intensely “accountable” to ordinary citizens. If those ordinary citizens change the channel, the media outlets in question lose advertising revenue, putting their business in peril.
The problem – if you are the type that tends to worry about how the media is shite – is not that the media is unaccountable to ordinary citizens under the 1996 law, its that the media is more accountable to ordinary citizens under the 1996 law than before – the market having been freed from regulatory constraint.
And low and behold, ordinary citizens (actual real live ordinary citizens, not the mythical “ordinary citizens” of goo-goo wet dreams) like sexy, tarted up news a lot more than issues-oriented media oatmeal.
Dan Kervick 06.01.07 at 5:31 am
I am strongly inclined to reject the usual sorts of explanations for the decline of television news. Although I agree there is too much consolidation in the media industry, I don’t at all think that is the fundamental factor in the decline. That’s because, despite the consolidation, people actually have many more television choices these days than they had in those bygone days of quality televised news. Television news is now of lower quality because it more accurately reflects the true nature of consumer demand.
When I was a kid in the pre-cable area, there were really only three over-the-air stations to choose from in my suburban Connecticut area: one affiliate from each of the big three networks. There was also a grainy PBS station. I was not at all in a rural area, but a fairly densely populated part of suburban Hartford on the east coast. So I assume most parts of the country were similar, or even worse.
This network oligopoly allowed the network news divisions to run a quasi-collusive news business whose leaders were united in their collective, collegial determination to maintain a certain level of moral gravity and quality in their news programming. They all broadcast their news shows at the same time, and were able to manage the competition, and divide the sizeable audience amomng themselves. Since there was nothing other than news on TV at that time, no network execs, or advertizers, could see any tangible evidence that something other than news, or at least straight news, would sell in that time slot.
There was also much more of a sense that television was a sort of public service. But since the networks ran a small oligopoly, with plenty of viewers to go around, there was no competitive penalty for running news divisions on that public service model.
Then a few things changed. First tabloid newspapers came along. The tabloids were ultimately owned by big media empires. But that’s not what caused their rise. What created them was just the etrepreneurial discovery that there was a huge market niche to capture by producing tablid-style news. It turned out that a significant number of people preferred that steamy and scummy stuff to the Grey Lady and her ilk. It was a successful market innovation. TV people noticed.
Then cable came along. Although the cable systems do operate local monopolies, that fact pales beside the fact that cable systems offer many more channels than the three and a half I had to choose from as a kid. This immediately opened up the network news priesthood to previously unexperienced forms of competition for advertizer dollars. Some of these cable channels succeeded during the “news hour” by offering non-news television, or tabloid shows like Entertainment Tonight and Inside Edition. The latter were the precursors of the contemporary cable network primetime “news” scene.
If you want to find out why there is so much crap on the cable networks these days, I think you have to ask this question: Why do so many people want to watch all that crap? Really there are only two main answers: either (i) a lot of people always wanted at bottom to watch crap of that kind, but the industry was not structured to meet that untapped consumer demand, or (ii) people’s tastes and attitudes have changed. I think both may be part of the truth, but the first is the most important.
We live in a capitalist society in which people more or less get the news they want. It turns out a whole lot of people don’t necessarily like informative, reasoned, sober investigative reporting; they don’t want to watch reports on NATO meetings, budget debates and civil rights protests. They don’t even necessarily want true stories. They want to be entertained by stories that arouse their emotions and sentiments, are presented in an exciting and sensational manner, and feed them a diet of titillating outrages that validate their pre-existing prejudice and allow them the pleasure of venting their anger at their favorite villains.
Politicians are always competing for votes, so they have a hard time recognizing and articulating the the reality that a lot of the news sucks because news consumers are impulsive boobs. That line doesn’t seel very well in the political realm. But that’s what’s going on.
Lee A. Arnold 06.01.07 at 6:19 am
I don’t like the Telecomms Act, but this criticism is silly mudslinging. The Common Cause review’s Executive Summary asks, “Why did this happen? In some cases, industries agreed to the terms of the Act and the went to court to block them.”
But even then, this Act is far from being the sole or even a significant cause of the “assault on reason” treated in Gore’s fine new book. The mergers, and the intellectual flattening, started happening long before.
As to political control of the media, I would think that media ownership started looking useful to political propagandists at the exact moment the Reaganites ended the Fairness Doctrine. In his book Gore writes that it should be reinstated.
sd 06.01.07 at 6:50 am
The “Fairness Doctrine” is a by-definition abridgment of the 1st Amendment that might – might – be justifiable in a world where there are three broadcast TV networks but is flat-out nonsensical in a world in which there are countless TV channels, plus a big wide open internet.
It never ceases to amaze me that liberals defend the Fairness Doctrine. I mean, have you thought through 2nd order effects at all? Calls to bring back the Fairness Doctrine began to bubble up when it became apparent that conservatives dominated talk radio. But bringing back the Fairness Doctrine means living in a world where the Bush administration gets to decide what is “balanced” for eight years. You like that answer? Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine means begging the question of why it should apply equally to websites. You want to see a demand for equal time on Dailykos?
abb1 06.01.07 at 7:01 am
Yeah, I think it’s logically and empirically obvious that higher “media diversity” and these license renewal procedures would do absolutely nothing to produce a better news coverage.
Market competition mechanism is good for mass-production of cheap low-quality stuff for mass-consumption and that’s exactly what we get; if you want to organize mass-production of high-quality stuff – first kill the competition. Hence your NPR, your BBC, your PBS.
Jon 06.01.07 at 7:41 am
Then a few things changed. First tabloid newspapers came along.
They’ve been around a LONG time. My guess is since a few years after the newspaper was invented…. A big tabloid publisher looked on the Spanish-American war in 1898 as HIS war, for good reason, because he’d ginned up the war fever, and looked forward to the even more copies that war would sell.
Why do so many people want to watch all that crap?
Because it’s about entertainment, not just about education. And it isn’t ALL crap anymore. Because it’s all niches now, some of those channels actually have thoughtful stuff. Is BookTV crap? Or Mythbusters?
MFB 06.01.07 at 8:29 am
If a politician supports good policies while out of office, whereas when in office he either shut his face or tacitly supported harmful policies, should we not celebrate him doing something good for a change?
Rather, I mean, than taking his hypocrisy to justify undermining his support for good policies?
It’s not as if the people currently in charge are doing a vastly superior job to the one Gore did.
ejh 06.01.07 at 9:45 am
I think one problem here is that some of us have long memories and that those long memories include the recollection of Tipper Gore.
I bet Jello Biafra remembers her too.
Bruce Baugh 06.01.07 at 11:09 am
Public demand for crap all the time is overrated. Atrios periodically produces rating numbers that back it up: crap peddling and crisis mongering generate spikes in ratings, but only in the context of an overall long-term decline in viewership and readership. The line that media companies are somehow accountable to the public is, nearly all the time, so much hogwash. They are accountable in pratical terms only to large advertisers, who are in turn shielded from most (though not all) public concerns.
I’m quite willing to believe that Gore understates the extent to which the 1996 act contributed to the problem, but…geez. That act didn’t invent the Republican noise machine, or (for instance) contribute significantly to Whitewater coverage, or anything like that. It didn’t create the career of Karl Rove or others of his ilk. Etc etc.
Sk 06.01.07 at 12:53 pm
“…narrowed consumer news choices…”
What delusional doppleganger planet do they live on?
Sk
Barry 06.01.07 at 1:44 pm
“The “Fairness Doctrine†is a by-definition abridgment of the 1st Amendment that might – might – be justifiable in a world where there are three broadcast TV networks but is flat-out nonsensical in a world in which there are countless TV channels, plus a big wide open internet.”
Posted by sd
Yes, countless channels, and the internet.
Tell ya what – I’ll take the frequencies of the biggest station in each major market. They shouldn’t mind, because they’ve got the internet.
Right?
Guest 06.01.07 at 3:16 pm
It would be interesting to read a rewritten version of the Rich Byrne piece that included facts rather than assertions, citations to authority rather than ipse dixits. Lots of dots, no connections.
Dan Miller 06.01.07 at 3:30 pm
Barry, they would mind now, but would they mind in 25 years? Don’t you think that television and the Internet will be much more integrated at that point?
nick s 06.01.07 at 5:31 pm
It never ceases to amaze me that liberals defend the Fairness Doctrine.
Broadcast networks use the public spectrum. They are part of some of the largest corporations in the United States. All bar PBS carry advertising by other large corporations. Admittedly, the multi-channel environment has cut into the role of the network news, but those broadcasts still collectively draw a hefty chunk of viewers.
Your argument is somewhat parochial, though, given that plenty of CT readers come from countries that somehow manage to cope with restrictions on the broadcasting of political speech and oversight of the content of news broadcasts, particularly during election campaigns.
Matt Weiner 06.02.07 at 11:10 am
The license renewal thing really does seem like a red herring — is there a case on record of someone successfully using a license renewal challenge to improve regional news coverage? There’s one on record of people not doing so. (OK, I found one.)
Byrne’s point about radio consolidation is perhaps a good one, but I also think MFB is right that there’s no point in shooting the messenger if he’s not running for office again.
Lee A. Arnold 06.03.07 at 7:26 am
“The “Fairness Doctrine†is a by-definition abridgment of the 1st Amendment”
The Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine in 1969.
This comment is more of the intellectual flattening which Gore decries in the book, and he is right to imply that the Founding Fathers would have thought so too.
Functionally the Doctrine doesn’t prevent the media owner from speaking; it provides access to others to exercise the same right at the same decibel level. Lack of this access is one of the factors which has demoted reasoned debate in the U.S. democracy.
Lee A. Arnold 06.03.07 at 7:31 am
The Court decision made it clear that the Doctrine would not now be applied to websites because this spectrum is not limited to access.
maidhc 06.05.07 at 2:51 am
#24. PBS has been carrying advertising from large corporations since the first Bush administration, I believe. At any rate for quite a long time.
PBS generally runs only about 4 minutes per hour of advertising, versus 10 minutes per hour for commercial broadcasters (I think there is still some limit on this) and around 15 or 20 minutes per hour for cable channels.
PBS runs so many shows about beautiful unspoiled nature sponsored by big oil companies that it is often referred to as the “Petroleum Broadcasting System”.
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