Monday, February 02, 2009

Then. Now. Panic.

Television news: then and now.

FIRST, THEN. Note especially David Brinkley's summation of the events of Nov. 22, 1963, starting at about the two-minute mark of the video.

Now . . . now. Let us look at what passes for a contemporary news voice -- one who is fatuous enough when sober as a judge. Here, however. . . .


HOWARD BEALE was right. We're in a lot of trouble.

2 comments:

Colleen said...

Jeepers. But have you seen the newscasts on WAFB lately?

The Mighty Favog said...

Not since I could watch WAFB online during Gustav. How to describe?

How about a folksy version of "If it bleeds, it leads"?

OTOH, by contemporary mid-market, local-TV standards, Channel 9 probably isn't so awful. Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations!

What's notable to me anymore is how sloppy TV graphics are, full of rank misspellings and sheer unintelligibility. Just slightly less notable is how illiterate the news scripts are.

Go back on YouTube, find some of the oldest *local* news clips you can and note how much better written newscasts were then. It's striking.

Slowly but surely, we're becoming a nation of dopes.