“We’ve got some explaining to do”: The hypocrisy of Shep Smith, Fox and 24 hour news.

It is odd despite the everyday nature of 24 hours news and the mass live broadcast  public murder/suicide of  September11, we remain shocked when ugly life happens in front of us. The latest outbreak of ugly life outrage occurred today, when Fox News apologised for showing a suicide from a live car chase in Arizona.

Shep Smith was the on air man providing explanation and context for Fox News viewers in the god voice from the point of view of the TV helicopter. As rhe chase ended on a dirt road, the hinted man went berserk  He staggered around like a hunted deer in the spotlights fleeing from police but unable to escape the glare of the helicopter.  Clearly cornered, this might have been the moment to end live coverage and let ;police do the job. Instead the camera kept rolling while Smith struggled with the interpretation for his viewers. “I would just- he is looking rather erratic, isn’t he?,” said Smith sounding less godlike by the second.

While Smith waited for re-assurance from somewhere, his filled pauses of ums and dunnos and oh mys questioned what was happening. Both cornered men were increasingly out of options. “Well, it looks like he’s a little disoriented or something…” Smith suggested about the other, desperate to re-assure viewers this could never happen to them "...It’s always possible he could be on something.” While Smith invented the news, the cameras rolled on.

Utterly helpless and hopeless, the man reached for a gun and killed himself. After a second, the video jerks back to the studio. There is the strange sight of Smith issuing repeated cries “get off” for six seconds. Each call is more urgent than the last, until he shouts one final “GET OFF IT”. He turns away from the camera before they finally break for an ad claiming to be for “mesothelioma families” - Call Now 1-800-444-Meso - but is actually for lawyers.

When he returned Smith didn’t apologise for the fake ad but there was extraordinary grovelling for airing the suicide footage. “We’ve got some explaining to do,” began Smith. With the “we” Smith spread the blame across the organisation. “While we were taking that car chase and showing it to you live, when the guy pulled out of the vehicle, they went on five second delay. So that’s why I didn’t talk for about ten seconds,” he said. “We created a five second delay as if you were to bleep back your DVR five seconds, that’s what we did with the picture we were showing you. So that if we would see in the studio five seconds before you did, so that if anything went horribly wrong, we’d be able to cut away from it without subjecting you it.” Smith paused before adding “And we really messed up.”

The mess up was not only the suicide but the strange editing error that followed immediately after it (36 seconds into the video) that makes a double-voiced Shep say incoherently “I am all very sorry”. Shep said the footage “didn’t belong on TV” but he didn’t explain why. Instead he worried about the internal systems that failed to keep the content out. “We took every precaution, we knew how to keep that from being on TV,” he said. “And I personally apologise to you that is what happened. “

Looking to the side rather than direct into the camera, Shep continued: “Sometimes we see a lot of things we don’t let get to you, because it is not time appropriate, it’s insensitive, it’s just wrong. “ He turned back to face the camera. “And that was wrong. And that won’t happen again on my watch and I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll update you on that guy and how that went down tonight on the Fox Report.” Smith repeated he was sorry and then changed his voice to uplift for the next story: “Now, the attack on…” The show must go on.

A lot of people weren’t going to wait for the Fox report or Shep's watch to see “how it went down.” His audience protection argument might have worked 10 years ago but not any more. It wouldn't take long for someone to send the footage viral. Gawker were quick off the mark with a link with caution to the original footage via Buzzfeed as well as the strange apology.

The first Gawker commenter picks up an obvious problem: “I'm confused. If they went to 10 second  delay, how did the suicide end up on screen anyway? I don't understand Shep's explanation,” Scout’s Honour said. It was five seconds not ten, but the point holds up. Fox News overplayed its hand while Shep struggled and while it recovered in one second, it took the host six seconds to realise they had recovered. In panic, Shep did not realise for five seconds, someone has pressed “dump” button out of the broadcast. He was shouting at the delayed footage.

It was a category error on several levels that asked many questions of Fox and 24 hour news. Car chases are popular time sinks for the networks and easy to follow by helicopter.  When a chase unfolded on air in 2009, Smith quipped on air about the energiser bunny and how he had enjoyed this type of entertainment for many years. So after Buzzfeed, Gawker and others quickly pounced on the mistake, it was surprising to hear several journalists blame the messenger. The Columbia Journalism Review tweeted, “Who's worse? @FoxNews for airing the suicide, or @BuzzFeed for re-posting the video just in case you missed it the first time?” while Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa asked “Why is Buzzfeed sharing a suicide video?”

Al Tomkins in Poynter answered both questions saying the Fox hypocrisy deserved to be given the widest audience . Tomkins ask for the guidelines for broadcasting chases. Are they prepared to air the worst possible outcome from an unfolding story? What outcomes are they not willing to air? Why? How do they know know the worst possible outcome will not occur?   Broadcasters will ignore Tomkins' inconvenient questions about motivations and consequences and show them for the same reason they show the 1-800-444-Meso ads: They make money.

Tompkins acknowledged chase coverage could be is useful for people near the scene. But his unspoken argument was that they served mostly commercial ends. “These are humans involved, struggling with their lives as we transform them into “stories,” he said. “They are humans, they are not ratings points.” But as long as there are ratings points, we will have to put up with the occasional pious homily about live deaths.

ABC News Twentyfour Seven Eleven

In 20 years time when they ask the trivia question “in what year did ABC start its 24-hour television news channel?”, I hope we will not remember the answer with a sense of nostalgia for something we’ve lost.

I certainly have no idea what television will look like in 20 years but I suspect whatever medium it transforms into it, its content would still include 7 x 24 news with some kind of local slant. The ABC “News 24” stationed launched today despite the grumblings of Sky News Australia’s owners (and there is no reason in time it cannot become the Al Jazeera of the Asia Pacific, especially if it can nail overseas broadcasting.

There are plenty of misgivings of course, and Sky's is not the limit. As far back as the 1840s Henry David Thoreau noted our inventions are pretty toys which distract attention from serious things. At time, the US was rapidly linking itself up by magnetic telegraph to Britain and also internally from Maine to Texas.
But as Thoreau reminded us the first news on these newfangled tubes may well have been that Princess Adelaide had the whooping while Maine and Texas, may have nothing important to communicate to each other.

Thoreau was right to sound his warning about the blandness of news into the “broad flapping American ear” but completely wrong in his guess - Maine and Texas had plenty of important things to communicate as they shared in the national imagining of a greater America. The ABC News 24 channel can fulfil a similar role here.

Visionary Managing-Director Mark Scott has no doubts about its raison d'etre. He told his own reporters there should be a 24/7 news channel on Australian free-to-air television and the public broadcaster ABC was ideal to run it “given our history, given our experience, given our resources given our integrity, given our independence.” He says News 24 will ensure the ABC's future in broadcasting.

Others are not so sure. Jason Wilson said the public is entitled to be sceptical about its long-term expansion. He said the broadcaster is already overstretched and no new resources have been allocated for the channel. It means the station must reuse content for other media, poach staff from other departments and expect the journalists to work longer hours.

Wilson wonders whether ABC are straying too far from “core business” and should be looking at more innovative ways of delivering content in the post-broadcast age. “There's no convincing case for creating yet another one-size-fits-all continuous news broadcaster when cheap, plentiful bandwidth will allow for the distribution of a plethora of niche, on-demand or streaming audiovisual content,” Wilson said.

As usual Wilson makes astute points. However this long tail approach leaves the audience feeling fragmented which leads to yearning for a more centralised delivery. ABC has a role in providing informed news across Australia. When the national broadcaster was set up in 1932, the newspapers at the time (led by Keith Murdoch) fiercely resisted moves for its radio station to include news. But by the end of World War II, it was increasingly clear the ABC had a mandate to produce despite Murdoch’s best efforts in his wartime role of Director-General of Information.

Keith’s son Rupert is still making his displeasure known about public broadcasting unfairly impinging on his turf, but that to me seems more of a reason to treasure the ABC. But taxpayers should not be expected to pay additional dollars for this new service. Working harder, repurposing content and shifting staff are all reasonable demands when the money is not there up front. For now, ABC News 24 may have to “fake it till it makes it” but with broad public trust and time on its side, the oily rag can one day turn into a silk coat. I welcome its addition to the public sphere.

Prime Television beancounters lose faith in regional Australia

In the same week as the smaller New South Wales cities launched a campaign to lure Sydneysiders out of the Big Smoke, one of the big television stations has kicked the regions in the teeth by closing studios in two of its major towns. The three-year $2 million Evocities campaign which kicks off next month was created by the cities of Albury, Armidale, Bathurst, Dubbo, Orange, Tamworth and Wagga Wagga, with the aim of promoting life in regional NSW. But two of those towns, Orange and Wagga, have just lost one of their main channels of information with the local news studio shutting down facilities to avoid the cost of digital conversion.

The guilty party is Prime Television, which is an affiliate of Channel Seven. They said the closure is happening because they cannot afford any upgrades after the News services move to Canberra. This seems like a spurious reason given that it only cost them $100,000 to upgrade their Albury studio to digital. The move is part of a growing trend to ignore the public affairs interests of regional areas in favour of cost cutting to meet bottom lines in an increasingly aggressive media marketplace. Prime’s studio facility in Tamworth which produces two news bulletins for North West and North Coast will also close in 2011. Little of the $240m bribe (disguised as a “rebate”) Stephen Conroy handed the industry in February seems to be making its way to country areas.

The two closing stations have almost 50 years of association with their towns. The Orange-based station is the former base of CBN8 which began in 1962 as one of the first regional stations in NSW. The Wagga studio is the former regional station RVN2 which began broadcasting two years later. RVN and CBN produced hours of local programming including quiz shows, children's programs and news until satellite and microwave links made networking possible in the early 1970s. Both were incorporated into the Prime Television network in the 1980s in the lead-up to aggregation, the process used to expand choice to regional viewers in the eastern states. Local services were reduced to a half-hourly news bulletin. Some of the big players now have an interest in Prime. Seven’s owner Kerry Stokes paid $20m in 2009 to take a 11.4 percent stake which Lachlan Murdoch’s Illyria also bought 8.9 percent last year. These men do not give a flying fig about local content rules and care only for the bottom line.

In March Prime announced services originating from Orange and Wagga would end in July to be replaced by a Canberra bulletin. Reporters will still be based in each local area but the half-hour bulletins will be compiled from the national capital. At least one full-time position will disappear from each centre. As Talking Television points out, Prime’s move will effectively mark the end of local television production as rival operators such as NBN, WIN and Southern Cross Ten already have centralised facilities for the provision of local news.

According to ACMA, new rules were introduced in January 2008 to cover local content on regional commercial television broadcasters. The licence requires broadcasters to show at least 1.5 hours of local content in any given week and a minimum of 12 hours over six weeks. Local content is defined as “material of local significance” which can relate to either “a local area, or to the licensee’s licence area.” There seems little doubt licensees will cling to the latter definition as they strip local towns of their ability to produce news.

According to its latest annual report, Prime made a profit of $175 million in the year 2008-2009. The document noted that while the changeover to digital transmission brings new growth opportunities they lost $5 million a year when the Government’s Regional Equalisation Plan rebates ended. The REP was the 2000 brainchild of the Howard Government to defray half the cost of digital conversion for the regional broadcasters. At the time it was thought Australia would be fully digital by 2004 but now it won’t happen until 2013. But Labor ended the rebate this year.

These are tough times for television. Prime wrote off the Orange and Wagga stations as “dinosaurs of the digital age”. But it wouldn’t have cost too much to transform them to survive the digital comet and it would have been a great act of faith in regional Australia. Sky News boss Angelos Frangopoulos, who cut his teeth at Prime in Orange, predicted what will happen in their absence. "The reality is that era of proper locally produced regional television pretty much ended a long time ago," he said."It's important that regional TV doesn't perpetuate the mistakes made by regional radio stations and remove so much localism that it has just become a network feed with 1800 numbers and weather inserts attached."

The future of news

When the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer hit the presses in March, there was a great deal of lamenting that presaged the end of an era. Perhaps it did end, but it also heralded in a new one. Though 160 of its 180 editorial staff lost their jobs, those journalists that stayed were re-trained and multi-skilled. They are now no longer called reporters but “news gatherers”. But while their technical skills are new, their investigative ones are not. And both are still required in the 21st century.

There are many shiny tools at the disposal of the new news gatherers. The attraction of Twitter is that it answers the fundamental question “What are you doing?” Its exponential growth has led to a company valuation of one billion dollars despite it not earning a cent in ads. Twitter may not be a viable business yet but with its short, sharp bursts of information, conversation, and real-time search facility, it is an ideal carrier of news. It is no wonder politicians, journalists and PR people love it.

But Twitter is not just the preserve of insiders and the need for news is universal. News speaks to something deep within humans. When the anthropologist Raymond Frith went to the Western Pacific island of Tikopia, he found a Polynesian society with a great thirst for news. Whenever two inhabitants met, they spent most of their conversation swapping news. Indeed the Tikopia word for “news” was the same as the word for “speech”. According to news historian Mitchell Stephens the Tikopia experience is a universal one. Stephens says news can best be described as one of our senses. He calls it a social sense that leaps over synapses between people and provides awareness of the world.

In western society our news is mostly mediated by mass communication. Inventions such as the printing press and television have each transformed the way news is told. Now the Internet is changing it again, providing an almost instantaneous global feedback system. The old one-way broadcasting system is dying but no-one is exactly sure what will take its place. While the people formerly known as the audience now seek a new label to descibe them, intermediaries can still play a vital sense-making role. It remains the primary job of journalists to produce and disseminate information about contemporary affairs of public interest and importance.

But as everyone knows, journalists don’t just interpret news; they also create it. In New York in the 1890s a young ambitious reporter named Lincoln Steffens got involved in a contest with a rival named Jacob Riis to report on sensational and salacious crimes. Both men were egged on by their editors in a newspaper arms race. There was no increase in crime, just in reporting of it. But before long panicked New Yorkers believed they were living amid a crime epidemic. The embarrassed police commissioner (and later President) Teddy Roosevelt knew both Steffens and Riis and called them into his office to explain what was going on. He told them to stop the nonsense. They agreed and New York’s crime wave disappeared as suddenly as it started.

The moral of that story as communication scholar Michael Schudson points out, is not that the journalists made stuff up, but that they created an impression which people believed and responded to. News is vital to the democratic process and a sense of community but it is also capable of trivialising or distorting what is important. The media that produce the news play a wide variety of role: supporting the establishing order, picking holes in the established order, being a forum for political debate and acting as a battleground for elites.

The media is itself part of the elite. It could be argued that news is what makes the media such a privileged social institution. Newspapers may be disappearing but their influence remains vast as they became a prototype of all media that followed it. As noted by the name, news was their central ingredient and radio and television were modelled on the newspapers with news as central to their mission. This may be changing in the 21st century, however. News is now regularly outrated by sport and reality television and radio stations cut costs by hubbing their news or avoiding it altogether. Meanwhile the most-clicked stories on websites barely qualify as news at all.

But the human need for genuine news remains even if the commercial media think they can no longer make money out of it. And its social value is also unchanged. Steffens may have created a crime wave but society depends on news of violations of the law to reinforce their understanding of it and fear punishments if they transgress it. Humans are hardwired to be interested in portents, anomalies, and spicy happenings. The Internet is an immediate, crowded and complex place, but has not changed the nature of news nor has it lessened the need for news gatherers in a functioning democracy. It is gradually replacing television as the new home of awareness of the world. This is why the questions of who pays for it and how are so important.

Woolly Day

In September 2008, The Australian's media writer Mark Day famously wrote that blogging had all the intellectual value of graffiti on a toilet door. Day claimed this was a phrase he overheard but it is reasonable to believe he shares the opinion. And judging by his column in today's paper he hasn't backed away much from the toilet door. His headline “bloggers may howl but there’s sense in cash for content” went hunting for condemnation of Rupert Murdoch’s paywall plans and found it in the blogosphere. Here, said Day, “99 per cent of the reaction was negative ranging from the adamant ‘I will not pay, full stop’, to the slightly more wistful ‘bye-bye News’”. Unfortunately Day didn’t name his howlers so I can't tell you who he was talking about. Most of the arguments I’ve read about the pros and cons of paywalls in the last few days (in paid and unpaid media) were a lot more well-informed and reasoned than the examples found in Day’s “blogosphere”.

What makes these attacks more puzzling is that Day’s rage against bloggers are to be found in a column called “Mark Day’s blog”. And it is a proper blog (not just shovelware from the print column) because of one important addition: the ability of his audience to add comments. It was Spinopsys (itself a hybrid creation “somewhere between Twitter and a blog”) who solved the conundrum for me when he linked to a comment Day himself made on the blog this afternoon. Day piped up after most of his previous commenters had expressed strong opposition to the paywall. “There’s very limited support for paid news sites. Are we surprised?” responded Day. “No. It’s fully anticipated (along with the abuse which some of you persist with, goodness knows why) and emphasises the point I make in the column ... the blogosphere is opposed, almost by definition.”

But there was a problem with Mark Day's own definition. He conflated blog commenters with blog authors. In revealing his inability to differentiate between the two, Day showed exactly how little he knows about what is happening outside his cosy little world of club journalism. And perhaps worryingly, his opinion may just be reflecting the boss. Day is an experienced old-fashioned journalist in the Murdoch mould who has also dabbled in business (he was the last owner of the century old muckraking tabloid Truth before it collapsed in 1995). And his Australian column “On Media” is a weekly rehashing of various Murdoch mantras such as “Rump of [Packer] empire a juicy no-brainer for News” (6 Dec 2007), “don’t die in the ditch for privacy reform” (14 Aug 2008), or “Clamour for paid sites rises as newspapers struggle” (9 Feb 2009).

It is interesting that this last article is not available online, because it seems Murdoch was paying attention back in February. Day wrote that article in the wake of News Corp’s 2008 last quarter $US8.4b write-off to which Murdoch’s response that “more people than ever are hungry for news”. The problem then as Day saw it was not a lack of readers but a lack of revenue caused by the industry’s giveaway culture. He said that the idea of paying for newspapers when the content is freely available on the net is “insanity, [and] a lunacy, that by all logic must be reversed”. Day canvassed the idea of a universal payment system that might involve digital coins or tollway digital passes (Charlie Brooker also toys with micropayment “magical coins” idea today in the Guardian). But even at a few cents a pop (Day suggested $30 a month), the end result of such a system would be a two tier system of Internet access where only the wealthy will not worry about how many hundreds of impulse clicks they might do in a day. Yet Day did get close to a possible solution to the problem. The $30, he said, “is what most people pay their internet service provider to deliver it now”.

The Internet, as he reminds us, is not free now. We generally accept we must pay for broadband connection fees. It is the ISPs and mobile phone companies whom we happily pay so we can get access to our Internet news. Could it be possible that people might pay an extra $20 or $30 up front and allow service providers and content makers to divvy it up? While the telcos and ISPs won’t warm to having their income streams tampered with, the smart ones will be those who hook up earliest with the big content providers and work out a deal. These partners will have some chance of surviving the carnage that will be unleashed by paywalls. Oddly enough, I expect the redoubtable Day will also somehow ride out the storm. Like some white-haired Lear, he’ll be found howling somewhere on the electronic heath, spitting out invective against his ungrateful daughters in the “blogosphere” who never appreciated the good work he did in dividing up the kingdom.

And that’s the way it is: Walter Cronkite dies

On the fortieth anniversary of humanity’s biggest feat – the first moon landing – the man who told his nation “and now we have two Americans on the moon” has died. Walter Cronkite died in New York aged 92. The man who anchored the CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981 died of cerebrovascular disease with complications from dementia. In July 1969, he was on air for 27 of the 30 hours of Apollo 11’s mission and his marathon live coverage brought the excitement and impact of the moon landing into the homes of millions of Americans and observers around the world. He remains the only outsider to have won NASA’s Ambassador of Exploration Award which he picked up in 2006.

That award was one of many in a lifetime of achievement. His name has become virtually synonymous with the position of news anchor worldwide. In Sweden anchors are known as Kronkiters whereas the Dutch called them Cronkiters. In America, Cronkite was not just an anchor he was also an honorary member of families he had never seen or met. “Uncle Walter” was voted the most trusted figure in American public life in surveys in 1972 and 1974. But Cronkite viewed himself as a working journalist and his title at CBS was "managing editor" of the Evening News. His way was to get the story, "fast, accurate, and unbiased".

Cronkite learned this credo during his days as a wire service reporter. Walter Leland Cronkite was the only child of a dentist father and homemaker mother who moved from Missouri to Texas when he was young. Walter attended The University of Texas at Austin in the 1930s and worked as a student reporter for The Daily Texan campus newspaper. Cronkite left university without a qualification. He worked at public relations firms, newspapers, and in small radio stations throughout the Midwest. In 1939 Cronkite joined United Press to cover World War II. He joined a unit fondly remembered as the "Writing 69th" a group of civilian journalists trained to take part in high-altitude bombing missions.

The breath of his war coverage was enormous. As well as flying many bombing mission over Germany, he went ashore in Africa and D-Day landings, he parachuted with the l0lst Airborne, he covered the Nuremburg trials, and ran the UP's first post-war Moscow bureau. His own view of his war record was characteristically modest. “Personally, I feel I was an overweening coward in the war. I was scared to death all the time,” he said. “I did everything possible to avoid getting into combat.”

True or not, Cronkite was certainly made for media combat. Fellow war veteran Edward Murrow recruited him for CBS Washington in 1950. "My first love was newspapering," Cronkite later wrote. "But as the 1940s drew to a close television was coming into its own, and it became evident that the young industry would eventually become the dominant form of entertainment and news."

His first job in front of the camera was as host of a historical recreation series You Are There. He briefly co-hosted the CBS Morning Show with the puppet named Charlemagne the Lion. Cronkite impressed with his anchoring of CBS's coverage of the l952 presidential nominating conventions. But it would take another ten years before he would finally take over the centre stage Evening News anchor role from Douglas Edwards. In October 1963 the broadcast was increased from 15 to 30 minutes and the first expanded broadcast included an exclusive interview with President Kennedy.

Barely a month later, Cronkite fought back tears when he reported to a shocked world that Kennedy had been assassinated. If that announcement was Cronkite’s apotheosis as a news anchor, it was the coverage of the Kennedy funeral that manifested the power of TV to involve an entire population in a ritual process. And Cronkite was ideally placed to benefit from that power. From 1967 through to his retirement, the CBS Evening News was the nation’s top rating television program. Americans turned to Cronkite to learn about the Moon landings, Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis.

Cronkite was acclaimed as an unbiased reporter but when he took sides, he was extremely influential. In 1965 he applauded the “courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia”. But three years later he was not so sure. He visited Vietnam after the 1968 Tet offensive where his report advocated negotiations and the withdrawal of American troops. "We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said. "We are mired in bloody stalemate." Though Cronkite’s 30 second TV grab was inaccurate, his report shifted public opinion and was crucial in Johnson’s decision not to recontest the 1968 presidential election. After the broadcast, he reportedly told advisors, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

When Cronkite announced he was going to retire in 1981, there were signs of palpable public panic. A briefly popular T-shirt posed the half-joking question, "Oh, my God - what are we going to do without Walter Cronkite?" But he did not disappear from the public eye. His hosting of PBS's broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic has become as much a New Years Eve tradition as the dropping of the ball in Times Square. He has also hosted PBS documentaries on health, old age and poor children. In l993 he signed a contract with the Discovery and Learning Channel to do 36 documentaries in three years.

Failing health finally crippled his output in the last few years. Tributes poured in from ordinary viewers after his death. “There is not one major (public) event in my life that Walter didn’t lead me through. Not one,“ said one. “I don’t believe Walter Cronkite has departed. Not until I hear it from him!” said another. Cronkite was at the height of his power (and powers) during an era of attributed-style journalism. There was no CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews or Al Jazeera. The Internet was still the plaything of military scientists. When he said “that’s the way it is” at end of his TV network news, America believed him, partially because of his aura and partially because there was so little choice but to believe what he reported. But the era of news that does no more than quote officials and experts is just as dead as the master broadcaster himself. And that’s the way it is.