I’ve been spending a lot of time in the journalism department offices in Bartlett this semester. So much so, that I’ve begun to consider it a second home, after The Collegian newsroom. This is partially because I have two classes in Bartlett and the journalism department is more comfortable than the hallway or those odd IKEA chairs in the lobby, but it’s also partially due to one of the journalism peer advisors, Sam Denette, who loves baking and keeps bringing in cookies, cupcakes and brownies she makes herself. She grew the wheat to make the flour, milked the cows and devised a romantic iPod playlist to get the hens in the mood for the rooster.
The first thing people notice when they walk in there, after the smell of fresh-baked, homemade chocolate cream puffs – she made the chocolate from cocoa plants she grew herself in a greenhouse she built with her own hands – is the HDTV. It hangs there and almost always has CNN on.
I usually arrive about 30 minutes to an hour before class and unfortunately you can’t watch CNN for more than 25 seconds without seeing how dull and repetitive it is and on top of that, after an entire semester of watching Ali Velshi, I cannot get over how perfectly round his head is.
It’s a perfect sphere. I don’t understand how his features are attached. Maybe he has pins or glue to do it.
Anyways, it’s not that CNN is bad, per se, it’s just that, as a news organization, they’re laughable. It’s not even just CNN, it’s part of the whole nature of the 24-hour news cycle. One of the few times we didn’t watch CNN was during the “bomb scare” at Logan International Airport three weeks ago.
Out of sheer exasperation with CNN we had turned on Fox News. The Fox anchor was reading the same thing that was appearing as an on-screen graphic, only in different formulations, so it seemed like she was saying a bunch of different things. The images were of a generic piece of Logan’s tarmac from quite a distance. No one was in view and they had no information, so they had to keep repeating the same thing over and over again. We turned back to CNN to see the exact same thing.
Tuesday was no exception. There was Velshi, head retaining its perfectly spheroid shape, talking to some people about the compromise between Congressional Republicans and President Obama on the plan to keep the Bush tax cuts for another two years and extend unemployment benefits, adding billions of dollars to the deficit the Republicans pledged to eliminate. Good thing the elections are over.
Well, within the next few minutes Velshi announced that the president had called a press conference for 2 p.m. (Graphic: “Press conference: 2 p.m.”) and then we were shown live breaking news film footage of the White House briefing room, completely empty except for people from other news organizations setting up their video equipment. This continued for a few minutes until, movement – the camera zoomed in on a plain white door before zooming back out (Graphic: “Breaking news: exclusive coverage of this door”).
Now, I’m a print journalist, so I might be proposing something that the Holy Brotherhood of Television Anchors considers completely heretical and any television anchor practicing it should be burned at the satellite dish, but my instinct would be to do something in-depth about the compromise. You know, actual reporting. Instead of film, no matter how exclusive, of the presidential door or the Fox News correspondent trying to pick his nose without being seen, how about a piece involving someone from the Congressional Budget Office, someone from a respected think-tank like Cato or Brookings and other knowledgeable people talking about the issues in the compromise (Graphic: “Knowledgeable people discuss issues”).
I don’t want to be presumptuous, but it would be nice to see actual news on the TV news for once, because it’s not like they can bring us baked goods through the TV screen.
Matthew M. Robare is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
