PBS, CNN not so artful as dodgers Execs can't spit out answers to critics

Hollywood -- ... Nobody likes a dodge. ... Giving a non-answer, avoiding confrontation, failure to admit the truth, spewing bland verbiage in an effort to put us to sleep -- those are the worst offenses. ... CNN just flat out refuses to admit that it's getting its head handed to it by Fox News. This denial is ceaseless. Look, Fox News is pummeling CNN. It's not even a fight anymore. It's a bludgeoning. In the Nielsens universe, which governs all of television -- even news -- CNN can't beat Fox News. The latter is probably the best at understanding what a certain segment of the cable news audience seems to want -- news with a slant. Forget fair and balanced -- that's a slogan for people who believe the news media are biased toward the left. It's a message that caters to and comforts them. There's a term for that:

We no longer live in a world where everyone believes that the news media have no agenda. Objectivity seems antiquated as the level of jadedness in the public rises. The lines between opinion and news have been blurred for too long -- a blame shared by everyone in cable news. But CNN is still viewed as an entity attempting real journalism. Most journalists appreciate that.

So, Jim Walton, president of the CNN News Group and a longtime CNN throwback seen in journalistic circles as someone who is dismantling the glitzy star system of his predecessor, had a great opportunity to come in here and say, "Yes, Fox is beating us. But we're in different businesses entirely."

Instead, he couldn't even say his competitor's name, choosing instead to imply that CNN was Rolex and Fox News was Timex. He blathered on about quality and brand and God knows what else. It was a dodge, plain and simple. Everything was a dodge. At that moment, a good portion of the room would have paid anything to have Roger Ailes from Fox News come in and beat the snot out of CNN, at least verbally, as he's wont to do.

Walton, pressed hard about CNN's love affair with the Laci Peterson story, couldn't even tell the truth and say, "Yeah, you know, we maybe spend too much time on it. That's how cable news channels get ratings, and it's a tough game, and we'll take a look at the percentage of our time covering that story."

That's all he had to say. But he didn't. A little truthfulness goes a long way. What CNN needs to understand is that if it wants to claim that journalism is the only important thing and that ratings don't matter, fine. Then do journalism. Don't saturate the airwaves with one salacious story in an effort to get ratings. Stand up for what you believe in. Don't try to play it both ways. Get a game plan, for God's sake. Fox News has one. Maybe that's why it can articulate what it's all about. All Walton did is demonstrate that CNN doesn't know its own story.

PBS has a similar problem. For the most part, it creates fine programming, the kind that TV critics would love to champion. But PBS hasn't learned that it's in a competitive environment. No longer is the business so starkly simple that one can say, "We make quality programming, and everyone else airs garbage. " The fact is, cable channels do much of what PBS does, equally well, and market it better. The disadvantage for PBS is that the system it operates under is a gigantic mess -- the local stations wag the dog and always have. The government helps fund the system, annoying detractors who think some of PBS' news shows or documentaries are either biased or creatively unworthy. Local channels need to beg for money in pledge periods, using cheesy programming that does not reflect normal PBS programming but rakes in dollars - - confounding the idealized notion of the system as a whole and bugging the bejesus out of critics.

On top of that, PBS programs right into the teeth of the network schedule and can't for the life of it figure a way out of that buzz saw -- despite 200 critics trying to program the system for Mitchell and chief scheduler John Wilson every time the two groups meet here on press tour. This results in yelling matches that make everyone involved angry (and, given that it goes on year after year, bored). Every year we ask why they put their best stuff up against the networks (resulting in less coverage on our part), and every year PBS says ratings don't really matter and, besides, the system is working just fine.

But it's not. It's hopelessly broken. Only an insane person would try to run PBS.

She is a nice woman who seems tireless in her effort to make PBS better and have it run more efficiently and effectively. People who know her say those things, at least. In front of the critics, the message is somehow lost. You know where? In a dodge. She sits onstage with Wilson and Jacoba Atlas -- the latter two share the same title, senior vice president and co-chief program executive -- which is sooooo PBS it makes you want to vomit.

The three of them can't form a declarative sentence to save their lives. At least Mitchell believes that the vehement anger directed at PBS is a sign that critics really have a passion for the programming. That's mostly true. We wouldn't be there yelling at them if we didn't think the dysfunctional disaster that is PBS is something worth changing, if for nothing else than Ken Burns and others getting a chance to continue turning out brilliant work.

At each press tour, we all gather in a room and they begin trying to hypnotize us with meandering, polite, politically correct PBS-talk. We say, hey, we'd write about your shows more often if they weren't drawing a tiny fraction of what everyone else in the free world is watching. And yes, out of our duty to write about quality and to dig up gems, you do get ink. But you'd get a lot more of it if Suze Orman weren't dominating pledge periods and most of your best shows weren't competing with vastly more popular fare. Besides, the "quality" card can only be played so many times -- there are plenty of great educational fare, documentaries and PBS-like material elsewhere on the dial.

Mitchell's response? Dodging. She probably thinks she's answering, but in effect she's merely talking. If we had real answers -- even blunt ones like, "We think we're doing it right, period and next question" -- then maybe this painful dance would end. But Mitchell and company talk, and we try to find out what they're doing to fix the problems they so willingly say exist, and yet, nothing. There's a word for this: maddening.

Maybe CNN and PBS have flaws they can't bring themselves to talk about honestly. Maybe they haven't done the painful self-analysis that it takes to move forward in this interview-therapy thing we're both participating in. Maybe we critics are just plain wrong and CNN and PBS are both great -- couldn't be better.

Sometimes it's not easy giving tough love to people you like. But there's no dodging this: CNN is in denial and PBS is flat-out broken.

Alright, I am interested in your belief in a conservative spin on Fox. Since I don't get Fox News, I only get to see the Pulse and Fox News Sunday on my local Fox station. But, I am impressed by the balance in the news presentation in hard news.

Are you saying that the hard news stories are biased towards conservatives? If so, then I have as much a prob with that as liberal bias.

But, if you are talking about commentary pieces and opinion programs, then bias shouldn't matter. Anyway, I am just curious what type of programming you are referring to.

There is only one way to judge "objectivity" in news. "By their fruits ye shall know them."

That is, if you ever thought you would judge the amount of slant in a journalism, you would have to scrutinize that journalism after the passage of time. Look back at CNN coverage of ten and twenty years ago, and see to what extent, and in what direction, the attitudes embedded in the coverage seem obviously slanted, in light of history.

If you do that with journalism which makes no conscious effort to give conservatism an even break, you will inevitably see excessive criticism/inuendo slanted against conservatives.

We can't do that with Fox News yet because it's more recent. But I have no doubt that even FNC will in twenty years seem to give liberalism more than its due. Because the nature of free, competitive journalism is to make mountains of molehills to the detriment of conservatism.

Are you saying that the hard news stories are biased towards conservatives? If so, then I have as much a prob with that as liberal bias.

No, I don't think FNC's hard news is particularly biased. I say "not particularly" because there is always some degree of bias leaking through in any news report. It's just that FNC runs a lot of commentary and opinion programming, most of it rightward leaning. Contrast this with CNN, who doesn't run a whole lot of opinion/commentary, but runs a lot of what I consider leftward biased hard news.

Some of the news shows are conservatively oriented such as "Fox and Friends." Other anchors like David Asman and Tony Snow are outspoken conservatives. There's no harm in this provided that Fox hires outspoken liberals as reporters to balance things out. They have a more ideologically balanced staff than CNN does, however.

The only outspoken, conservative, on-air reporter at CNN is Lou Dobbs. As far as the other networks go, John Stossel is a lone voice among the on-camera staff.

the NYC intellectual who said after the '72 election: "this isn't possible, everyone I know voted for McGovern"

Every time I see that quote, I am reminded of a horrible truth: the same was true for me. I was at the time at undergrad living in Palo Alto, CA. Might as well have been Berkeley. People would tell me that the polls were crazy, that McGovern was going to win. I try to remember that around here... this forum can get to be the flip side of Palo Alto when McGovern was running. "Why, every Freeper I know hates Gore... how could he even get close?"

we elite lefties are stuck in a nation full of rightwing rednecks

That's part of their thing. It's genetic, I think. Sowell explains it pretty well in Vision of the Anointed.

doesn't leave a big group to draw from for that lefty Rush that they are always praying for.

I'm convinced that Rush Limbaugh is the Universe's revenge for commercial-free, taxpayer-supported Democratic Party Radio. NPR sucks all the liberals down to the left end of the dial, leaving the commercial radio stations with nothing but conservatives in their audience. So they hire conservative talk radio hosts. There will never be a Limbaugh-scale success with a liberal until they make the "good enough" commercial-free alternative disappear.

Any journalist can claim to be objective because they are only "reporting the facts". While there are certainly instances where errors have been made, that's not really where the bias occurs.

The lamestream media knows that when they make an outright error, there are now enough alternative "channels" that they are obligated to publish a correction. Of course, the correction is never given as much emphasis as the original, but it lets them pretend to be honest.

Bias in hard news takes several forms:

Selection of news stories to be broadcast or printed. A great deal goes on in the world every day, and one can't possibly cover all of it. But, media is a business, so they must pick the issues that is most likely to interest their target audience or promote their agenda.
Representation of both sides of an issue. Fairness requires diligence to give equal opportunity to each. You can introduce a lot of bias simply by choosing to interview a proponent that looks good or bad, depending on your desired outcome. Or, you can allow one side to make a faulty assertion without allowing the other side an opportunity for a fair rebuttal.
Quoting people or documents out of context. You've seen the latest example in the DNC ad where they left out an important qualifier in Bush's State of the Union speech. But, the media does it all the time, if it suits their purpose.

The last time I watched broadcast news regularly was during the Iraq conflict earlier this year. I felt that FOX was "cheerleading" for the US effort by concentrating on the successes, while CNN was focusing on every setback. FOX reminded me of the WWII movie newsreels, while I thought people at CNN wanted the US to fail.

CNN fancies itself to be like the network news divisions which all emphasize being boring as an asset.

I figure that comes from the very early days of broadcast news, when sane people would have been terrified of the enormous responsibility they were taking on in attempting to "inform the nation" of what went on that day. That must have been pretty heady stuff. "My God, anything I say into this thing will be heard by 20 million people. I could tell them the Martians have landed, and they'd believe it."

It's interesting that Network News has continued in this vein even as local TV news has turned into a circus. That's probably because the "Big 3" have been locked in essentially a 3-way tie for years. There isn't the incentive to "go for broke" that there would be one of them were obviously going down the tube. This may change as Dan Rather fades, but my guess is that CBS will conclude that Gunda Dan just got too old, so they'll go find a younger pompus @ss and continue along the same path. From a purely business standpoint, the obvious move is to do what Fox did: everybody else is liberal, so we'll be conservative. 100% of 50% is a bigger number than 33%. I expect this to happen at NBC before it happens anywhere else though. Those news divisions are all full of liberals; they'll never do it unless a steely-eyed corporate parent who cares about money, not invitations to Hillary's parties, rams it down their throat. That'll be GE before it will be Disney or Viacom.

There really are more outlets devoted to giving the conservative perspective of the news than liberal ones.

That's probably true in some numerical sense. We have 213 hay-burner radio stations, while they only have CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN.

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