Media: No Audience for Facts

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has been surprisingly limited in the mainstream media (and that includes the CBC). While most "national" papers in the United States (e.g. the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor) have followed up on the story well, the broadcast media has not. The only two audio programs that have consistently reported on New Orleans have been Open Source (first in radio form, then as a podcast) and, of all programs, Harry Shearer's satire show LeShow.

Last week in an appearance on the Dave Ross show (from KIRO-FM in Seattle, Washington), Shearer talked about his attempts at concrete activism surrounding New Orleans. His main critique of the mainstream media was that they had not reported on the fact that I had heard many times on his show that the levies did not collapse because of Hurricane Katrina per se, but because they weren't built properly in the first place. He had the opportunity to ask Brian Williams, anchor of the top-rated NBC Nightly News, why it had never been reported on his program. Williams' response, which Shearer commended for its honesty, amounted to "our audience is better served by personal stories."

In other words, the "tell me a story" approach to news pioneered by 60 Minutes' recently-deceased Don Hewitt does indeed run NBC's evening news broadcast. While I do not have an issue with using such a strategy for a magazine show like 60 Minutes, I do have a problem with it dominating a hard news show like a network's nightly newscast. Editors should be choosing the most important news of the day, and THEN the reporting staff should figure out the most compelling way to present it.

I find it especially galling in this particular case because it seems to me there is a good story to tell here. (In fact, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Shearer have told it.) The fact that a government agency--the US Army Corps of Engineers--had failed to properly build levies cries out for an investigative report showing how widespead the problem is across the country or how specific circumstances in New Orleans made this failure possible. Done right, it should be a very interesting story to tell.

Implicit in Williams' statement is not just a preference for story-telling over fact-reporting, but that the audience doesn't want facts but does want human interest stories. Hogwash. NBC is being lazy (as are all the other networks, for that matter)--they aren't putting in the time to figure out how to make facts turn into compelling stories. It's easier to take a known human interest story and present it, sometmes much harder to take a set of facts and figure out a story-telling version of it. Nothing is holding them back other than their own talent. (Some would also argue that money is holding them back, but I contend that with adequate talent, the stories to tell could be found at existing budget levels.)

The sad part is that audiences don't even know what they are missing, unless they also partake in alternative media. If New Orleans feels forgotten, it's for good reason. The mainstream broadcast media in the United States has decided that there are no good stories to tell there, even when some of the basic stories have not been told.