Last night, while other, more productive people were working on first novels, attending public hearings, grading papers, and changing diapers, I watched NBC Nightly News and took notes. Some people have meaningful lives; others eat dinner in front of the tv.
There is no news on Nightly News. There are stories. Last night there were eight: a plane over Washington, the grenade incident in Georgia the previous day, violence in Iraq, fallout from United dumping its pension program, illegal immigration in Arizona, the regular stock market report, King Tut on tour, and a profile of a Marine killed in Iraq. You don’t learn anything from these stories, but there are lots of moving pictures and men in suits speaking earnestly. This constituted nineteen minutes of a thirty-minute program.
Story lead-ins, previews of the stories coming after the next commercial break, and a weather update by the local affiliate, consumed another three minutes, roughly.
That left eight minutes for eighteen commercials. Eight were health related (prescription drugs for allergies, insomnia, and constipation; blood meters; over-the-counter medications for heartburn and headaches; low-fat foods). Three ads promoted NBC’s own programs, and others featured USPS’s online services, Capital One credit cards, Miracle-Gro Garden Soil, Hyundai, and Pedigree Small Breed dog food. Of course, there was the obligatory Levitra pitch directed at those who still believe there has to be more to marriage than just companionship and a nasty mortgage.
The constipation (or poor regularity) drug ad ran twice.
The traditional network news shows have an unusually old viewer demographic, which is the reason for all those pill-popping commercials and the obsession with health stories.
Posted by: Alan Allport at May 12, 2005 11:32 AMIt's quite a thing when you sit there and realize that you really are the target audience.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at May 12, 2005 11:40 AMI have to admit I have a real fascination with TV news. I've often thought that some team of anthropologists and linguists really ought to do a huge study of it, because to me it is one of the most bizarre and hyper-ritualized things I've noticed in our culture.
Just sit back for a few minutes with the news on and think to yourself, "These are real people. He is probably wondering which junior high school his son will be accepted to, and she has been preoccupied lately with whether to refinance her mortgage." That's when it becomes really surreal, to me, because that serves to defamiliarize their behavior and you (I) suddenly realize just how enormously stylized their behavior is and how little you noticed this before. It's like a genre to itself.
One moment on a local news show really crystalized it for me. It was years ago, the last segment of the show was about a recent lunar eclipse. The woman read off a few facts and figures about the eclipse as the image on the screen dissolved to an almost black image with a little blurry splotch of white in the center. It was pixilated and full of chromatic aberration due to the low exposure and apparent incompetence of the camera man, so it looked like it was shot on a vhs camcorder ca. 1980.
"And it was very...beautiful," she said firmly.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at May 12, 2005 11:44 AMAlan, rewrite that only slightly, preserve the last line, and you've got a lovely short story.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at May 12, 2005 04:45 PM