How to watch TV news (if you should watch it at all)
3 strategies and some thoughts on bias
It was sometime in 2012. I was browsing at Fact & Fiction, the beloved Delhi bookstore when I came across a book curiously titled, “How to Watch TV News”.
Huh?
Did one need to be taught to watch TV news? Did one really have to read a book to do so? Wasn’t it as simple as picking up the remote, switching on the TV and finding the right channel?
I was by then eleven years into my career in TV news. I had been a reporter, anchor and editor at CNBC, Headlines Today and CNN-IBN. So it was with a somewhat proprietorial interest that I reached for it.
I didn’t know it then, but one of the authors of the book, Neil Postman was a legend in the field of media theory. The co-author, Steve Powers, worked for decades in TV news and so the two of them were particularly well-qualified to write this particular book.
Why then should we learn to watch TV news?
TV, in sharp contrast to newspapers, books, and digital properties is an “open-admission” technology, the duo wrote.
“It is largely free. It is activated by the turn of a switch. Its programs are designed to gratify emotions immediately. It is more than friendly to its users. It adores them. As a consequence, the six-year-old and the sixty-year-old are equally vulnerable to what TV has to offer.”
There is also another aspect of TV that makes it ‘open-admission’: it does not require one to read and write.
This is a wonderful and democratizing aspect of the medium, and public television in particular has done well in educating people: think BBC, PBS and our very own Doordarshan in the eighties and early nineties. But as Postman and Powers write, television programming is increasingly optimized to gratify emotions. And as the number of commercial TV news stations has grown, the race to the top of the ratings has been dominated by programming that nakedly manipulates our emotions.
So what should the viewer do? Short of reading the book, here are three strategies. Postman and Powers actually have eight points to offer, but I’ve reduced them for simplicity’s sake.
Treat TV news like junk food. Indulge in it by all means if you have to, but don’t think of it as nutritious. Postman and Powers write, “Given the limited time and objectives of a television newscast, the viewer has to realize that he or she is not getting a full meal but rather a snack. And depending on the organization presenting the news, that snack may contain plenty of empty calories.”
Even the best TV news network gives you only a snack. I’m repeating the previous point of course, but it needs reinforcing. Often people ask me, which TV news channel should I watch? I say to them that all TV channels are alike and differ only in degree. The worst ones will give you food poisoning on top of everything else, but the best ones are at the most a snack rather than a full meal.
Supplement TV with other forms of news, preferably text-led digital or print. It’s taken me years after leaving TV news to admit this, but when it comes to a competition between TV news and print or text-led digital, the latter is a better source of news on almost every parameter.
As Postman and Powers write, “the whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on one page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.”
What about bias?
Often, people ask journalists about biased reporters, editors and TV networks. What they’re referring to is a deliberate bias or agenda. But most often, it is unconscious bias that is at work in the media: be it in newspapers, digital or TV. This is such a huge topic that it will require several issues/posts (and a familiarity with new terminology).
For now however, I focus on a bias that Postman and Powers write about: the bias of language.
When an anchor for example, uses just these four words: “an explosive development today…” in a newscast, bias has already come in to play. ‘Explosive’ is a subjective word and sometimes what is ‘explosive’ to one person is merely ‘routine’ to another person. Imagine listening to hundreds of such sentences in one TV news show.
The language in a newscast, Postman and Powers say, operates at multiple levels. There’s language that:
1) describes an event
2) evaluates an event
3) infers something
They explain this by using the following three sentences as an example:
“Manny Freebus is five foot eight and weighs 235 pounds.
Manny Freebus is grossly fat.
Manny Freebus eats too much.The first sentence may be said to be language as pure description. It involves no judgments and no inferences. The second is…a judgment that the speaker makes of the “event” known as Manny Freebus. The third sentence is an inference based on observations the speaker has made. In fact, a statement about the unknown based on the known. As it happens, we know Manny Freebus and can tell you that he eats no more than the average person but suffers from a glandular condition that keeps him overweight. Therefore, anyone who concluded from observing Manny’s shape that he eats too much has made a false inference.”
TV news, they point out, is stuffed full of descriptions, judgments and inferences.
Neil Postman passed away in 2003 but is having a renaissance today for another book of his, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he compares two dystopian novels and asks the question, whose world are we living in? Are we in the world of 1984 as envisioned by George Orwell, or are we in Brave New World as imagined by Aldous Huxley. Postman argues that we are living in the latter’s universe.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”
What do you think? Are we in Orwell’s world or Huxley’s world? I am tempted to think it is the latter. (Those curious to know more can read this piece on the topic.)
P.S. I probably wouldn’t have found How to Watch TV News in a regular bookstore, you know the type that mostly stocks the best-sellers. Fact & Fiction was a special place. Its proprietor Ajit Vikram Singh built a diverse and rare collection after years of adding and subtracting titles, but it shut down in 2015. Thankfully, we still have The Bookshop in Jor Bagh. In Mumbai, we have Wayword & Wise and in Bangalore we have Nagasri Book House, Blossom and Bookworm.
As Postman and Powers wrote, “the first lesson we have to teach is that preparation for watching television news begins with the preparation of one’s mind through extensive reading. This lesson is of sufficient importance that we have seen fit to include it in our preface.”
The list of bookstores above is just a starting list and relevant to my experience. But books are a good way to understand the news because they give us context and perspective. Especially during these coronavirus times when we’re all trying to stay home and practice ‘social distancing’.
Completely true. Proper news coverage,IMO should be boring and factual. If a news channel is making you feel happy or exciting, chances are they are sugarcoating the news with something else as well.