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March 04, 2007

Amusing Oursleves to Death With The Help of Fox

Neil Postman, an NYU professor and brilliant thinker about the media, in 1985 wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. I’m sorry that he passed away in 2003, because I’d love to hear what he had to say about the media today. The recent overkill coverage on television news and in the tabloids about Anna Nicole Smith’s death and Britney Spears’ shaved head validates Postman’s pessimistic and clairvoyant theory. I think we are amusing ourselves to death even more than we did in 1985.

By giving people what they want—amusement—the main-stream media (MSM) is doing nothing new. The French Emperor Louis-Napoleon “suppressed an insurrection in Algeria in 1856 by sending the magician Robert-Houdin to Algiers to bamboozle the locals with repertoire of amazing tricks, including his ‘bullet catch’ routine.” Napoleon III reasoned that if his subjects could be entertained, then they might not notice or care about the fact that his regime had taken away most of their liberties. An English critic, writing in the The Athenaeum noted, “So long as Parisians are amused, there is less probability of their thoughts dwelling on political slavery.” These quotes and paraphrases are from The Judgment of Paris.

The emperors of the MSM are using the same trick, hoping that we won’t realize that they are diverting our attention away from important issues such as the disastrous Iraq war, the Walter Reed and Veteran care scandal, or from other “negative” news. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. announced the latest diversion recently--the Fox Business Channel--which Murdoch and his right-wing lieutenant, Roger Ailes, indicated would be “more business friendly than CNBC.” Murdoch said that CNBC was quick to “leap on every business scandal,” clearly implying that the Fox Business Channel wouldn’t bother with that kind of negative stuff.

The Fox Television network won the ratings battle in the latest sweeps on the strength of two nights of “American Idol,” the biggest television diversion for the youth of America. Recently, the Fox News Channel scored a hit with its “The ½ Hour News Hour” program—a satire on the news. Obviously meant to compete with Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” but with a right-wing spin, the first episode featured conservative stars Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.

I’m not sure why the Fox News Channel is doing a satire of the news when the entire channel is a satire on the news. It’s what Dan Rather has properly dubbed as infotainment. Of course, the tragedy is that Fox News gets ratings, which is why CNN is trying to copy its tabloiditis. I suppose all of the programming on the new Fox Business Channel will be business tabloiditis. It will have to hire a female anchor/reporter who is sexier, cuter, and with better cleavage than the Money Honey, Maria Bartiromo, and who will have to cozy up to corporate types more alluringly than Maria does.

Here are some ideas for shows or segments for Ailes and the new, business-friendly Fox Business Channel: “The Sex Lives of CEOs!”, “Female CEOs, Chairman This!”, “What Goes On In The Boardroom!”, “The Jeff Skilling Show, Live!“, “The CEO Apprentice!” Imagine the possibilities--would-be apprentices would have to “audition” for CEOs like Donald Trump. Visualize positive coverage for all CEOs, corporations, and, of course, the Bush administration’s pandering to corporate interests. CEOs will love it and will refer to it as the Fox Business Promotion and PR Channel. No press release will be too outrageously self-congratulating not to get full coverage.

One thing these silly examples point out is that, as Neil Postman wrote, television is different from print. To make money in television, you have to get ratings, which means you have to entertain people by engaging their emotions and appealing to their prejudices and baser tastes. To be successful in print with an upscale audience you have to engage people’s minds, which is why magazines and newspapers that try to inform us (New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal) do so by dealing with reason.

This essential difference is probably why the Wall Street Journal, a great newspaper that has the second largest national newspaper circulation and appeals to the business community, still manages to cover and to break stories about corporate malfeasance. Its readers are intelligent, upscale people who seek information about business, not entertainment. And the Wall Street Journal is quite profitable.

Will the Wall Street Journal’s and CNBC’s audience, including corporate executives and Wall Street investment bankers, watch the Fox Business Channel and give it the same or more credibility than they give CNBC? WSJ readers and CNBC viewers love to have positive coverage of their own companies and investments and hate “negative” coverage, meaning anything other than positive coverage about something they are connected with. But as much as they like glowing stories and reports, cream-puff interviews, and the Money Honey, they like negative coverage and scandals about their competitors even more. Therefore, they will watch the cable business news channel that gives them the opportunity to stuff their quivers with arrows to shoot at their competition.

Fox, Murdoch, and Ailes might cynically believe that corporate executives and investors want the same kind of amusement that viewers of “American Idol” do, but I’m not so sure. We’ll have to see if WSJ readers and CNBC viewers want to amuse themselves to death when there’s a potential to pick up some dirt on the competition.

Posted by Charles Warner at March 4, 2007 05:56 PM

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