We are all too familiar with the trouble with the evening news shows. Ever since The CBS Evening News and The Huntley-Brinkley Report the trick has been to cram a day’s news into a half hour, which was actually 22 minutes when you subtract commercial, intro and closing, and promos.
The result has always been superficial coverage of everything. As early as the 1960s network news people lobbied for an hour, but the news lost money while the syndicated shows like Wheel of Fortune on the adjacent half hour were cash cows. Case closed.
Into the breach came The MacNeil/Lehrer NewHour which generally allotted the same fifteen minutes as the networks to a summary of the day’s major stories. That left it with much more time to conduct interviews of more than three questions with newsmakers and to offer a bit more news from around the world or from parts of America other than New York and Washington, maybe even a bit of coverage for arts and science.
Twenty-four hour news has made the evening headlines less and less important, which ought to permit greater depth, and if not from The NewsHour who? But a funny thing has happened to the PBS show since the departure of longtime anchor Jim Lehrer.
Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill and now in charge. Both are veteran newscasters who have seized the opportunity to diversify the NewsHour. In theory this ought to be a good thing. An awful lot of network news has always been powerful middle-aged white guys reporting on the activities of powerful middle-aged white guys.
But the NewsHour is in danger of going overboard. A liberal, humanist, global perspective is surely admirable, but may skew one’s perceptions of what stories are significant. The NewsHour by adding a lot of previously unreported or underreported stories to their mix runs the risk of increasing the breadth of what they cover but reducing the depth.
It also may reduce the appeal of the program to a far smaller segment of the potential audience. Sure, people for whom saving the whales, reducing their carbon footprint, seeking equality for all minorities and eating locally-sourced food are entitled to news about their interests, but not if it starts to crowd out the actual news of the day.
Lately, the headlines seem like an afterthought on the NewsHour which hurries to get on to the stories that it finds really interesting. Here’s a list of stories that took up a majority of the NewHour’s airtime over a span of four or five days recently.
Why movies don’t reflect the country’s actual diversity. The plight of pitiful Mideast refugees in Europe. The clash between laws permitting birth control for pitiful women in the Philippines and the Catholic Church. How faith helped a missionary doctor endure the ordeal of Ebola. Urban food deserts. Attacks on pitiful migrants in South Africa. A black opera singer on growing up in Ferguson, Mo. Casualties to pitiful women and children in Afghanistan.
There’s more. The dangers of uninspected black market shellfish. A unit of anti-poaching police in Zimbabwe made up entirely of women. How jobs can help rehabilitate minority ex-cons. The lack of parental leave in America versus other developed countries. All of these may be worthy stories, but what a lot of them there are. And how similar they are in some other ways, like their focus on disadvantaged women and minorities.
New shows on TV come down to a network each for angry conservatives and angry liberals and three innocuous, inoffensive networks hosted by amiable, sincere softball pitching anchors cramming the same old middle-of-the-road news into 22 minutes. Then there’s a network, CNN, desperate for ratings and prone to go 24/7 with the latest sensational hurricane, shooting, riot, or celebrity trial.
That leaves the NewsHour. It used to be the last refuge of the viewer seeking an intelligent survey, with a little more depth, of what’s up. If it continues to diversify itself into the channel of dissed minorities and underreported stories, like those above, it may wind up restricting its audience to well-to-do empathetic people who are heartsick at what a cruel world it is for women, minorities, animals and the environment.
That may be a niche for someone, but PBS used to worry about becoming the embodiment of pro-government, anti-business, social worker sentient parodied by sneering right-wing conservatives. Now it seems to be embracing that role. Pass the wine and brie while I switch the channel to BBC World News America.