What's wrong with TV news

Nieman Reports has published my review of Bonnie Anderson's "Newsflash": "The Precarious State of Television News"

A former CNN executive, Anderson delivers a scathing critique of how and why CNN and all American TV news networks have gotten so awful.  Unfortunately, she doesn't get into alternative solutions that may be found in new social media.  My review was written in January (to meet the magazine's publishing deadline), so much has already happened since then. My concluding paragraph:

Unfortunately, Anderson’s prescription for TV journalism applies to a media world that is fast becoming extinct. But then, her book came out in late May 2004. In the Internet age, that is already ancient history. By the time this article gets edited, published and distributed, it will probably be horribly out of date, too. Maybe by then somebody will have already made some more headway towards restoring honor to audio-visual journalism—to call it TV would be way too 20th century.

I'd be interested in hearing other people's reactions to the book and to the review.

Comments

[Pito Salas]

Rebecca, did you ever see Peggy Noonan's piece on the topic?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110006363

[o.lafaye]

BBC link is not a link to Global Voices but to invasive advertising.

Expect no help from established media.

olafaye

[Jon Garfunkel]

Rebecca,

Goodness gracious, I wanted to hear more about the charges of racism at CNN, about your experience in Tokyo being told to report "more like a tourist." That's interesting.

But then you dip into blog triumphalism. It's tiring. No one has yet pointed out where participatory media can meet the values that the old media has lost. Cable news is derided as being too immediate and not offering the necessary long perspective. So amateur video comes along in the wake of the tsunami disaster, and what can one say about it? It's faster than cable news. What is really the news value if Jeff Jarvis can watch tsunami video over the Internet right away?

One of the best developments, I feel, in recent era has been PRI's The World (Clark Boyd's occasional fawning over blogs nonwithstanding.) Per-cost and per-bit, I'd make the claim that it's far superior than video news.