Talk is cheap

When news isn't happening, the all-news cable channels are yapping. But why do they have to be so dumb?

by Dan Kennedy

US Representative James Traficant is raging on the set of CNN's The Spin Room. The Ohio Democrat, who survived one indictment two decades ago and who may soon be indicted again, has been yelling non sequiturs for the better part of 15 minutes about his legislative campaign against the IRS, his battles with his party's leadership ("wimp Democrats"), and his legal woes. But co-host Bill Press wants to talk about the weird, tangled, grayish clump that is Traficant's hair. "Can I ask you a personal question? Is your wife a hairdresser?" asks Press. Traficant doesn't answer. With time running out, co-host Tucker Carlson chirpily informs Traficant, "The second you're indicted we're going to have you back on The Spin Room." Responds Traficant: "I probably won't be back again."

Welcome to the stupid new world of 24-hour cable news, where it's all talking heads all the time, and where real news takes a back seat to artificially contrived, ludicrously oversimplified debates on subjects such as George W. Bush's tax-cut proposal, Jesse Jackson's finances, and Dick Cheney's heart.

It's a world in which the Fox News Channel's puffy-faced populist, Bill O'Reilly, feels so entitled that he complains when Newsweek fails to put him on the cover. In which Mike Barnicle, forced out of the Boston Globe for fabricating and plagiarizing, can have his very own talk show -- and why not, given that he works for MSNBC, the same operation that employs Iran-contra sleazeball Oliver North. In which CNN's Larry King can slide back and forth between hosting presidential-primary debates and presiding over shoutfests starring parents suspected of killing their babies and the people who hate them.

At CNN, the granddaddy of cable news, it's a time of anniversaries and transitions -- all bitter, none sweet. Two decades ago Ted Turner launched what was then called the Cable News Network to do battle with the Big Three broadcast networks. One decade ago his creation proved its mettle with its vibrant, live-from-Baghdad coverage of the Gulf War.

But now the all-news cable audience, never huge to begin with, is being carved up. MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, both launched in 1996, have grabbed nearly two-thirds of the 800,000 or so households that regularly tune in to cable news. (By way of comparison, some 23 million households still watch one of the three network newscasts each evening.) Turner sold out to Time Warner, which in turn sold out to upstart America Online, whose first act was to whack about 400 of CNN's 4000 staffers. Rick Kaplan, the former CNN president who launched NewsStand, an ambitious magazine show, is now holed up at Harvard. Anchor Bernie Shaw, a symbol of CNN's seriousness and gravity, has retired. And CNN isn't just cutting back -- it's dumbing down, too. Just like its competitors.

Maybe there's not all that much to do when there's no breaking news to report. For instance, when I first planned to write this piece, I was going to review the prime-time line-ups for Wednesday, February 28. But when a powerful earthquake hit the Seattle area, the cable channels dumped their programming and went live, which is exactly what they should do. (Never mind that they showed the same footage of large holes in the ground over and over.) The channels also performed a valuable public service -- and bolstered their ratings -- by broadcasting live for hours on end during the post-election fiasco in Florida.

Talking heads are a cheap way to fill time when there's nothing else going on -- and with small audiences and corporate owners obsessed with the bottom line, "cheap" would appear to be the operative word. But even if you accept the idea that the cable news channels aren't going to invest in a lot of expensive, original reporting, there's no reason that talk TV has to be this dumb.

To bone up for this article, I watched 15 hours of television -- essentially the entire late-afternoon and prime-time schedules on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, taped on Wednesday, March 7. I filled 50 sheets of 81/2x11-inch paper with notes.

And you know what? After all that tube-viewing, I saw fewer news stories than you'll find on the front page of the New York Times. I gleaned less intelligence than you'll get listening to All Things Considered for half an hour on your way home from work. ABC's Nightline is newsier, CBS's 60 Minutes is much better reported, Imus in the Morning (simulcast, by the way, on MSNBC) has juicier inside dirt, and the Sunday-morning talk shows all offer more substance and class.

So where to begin? At the beginning. With CNN, where it all started. And where, sadly, it's now all falling apart.

THE NATIONAL Journal's William Powers recently put it this way: "Tuning in to CNN these days feels like visiting the hospital room of an old friend dying a slow, painful death." MSNBC has cornered the market on young and hip. Fox zoomed to prominence by making a blatant appeal to conservatives. CNN targets mainly those who can't get Fox or MSNBC (CNN is available in 81 million US households, which is about 20 million more than either of its competitors can claim) and those who enjoy watching a slow-motion car wreck.

The sad thing is, my viewing suggests that CNN still has the highest standards (though not, as we shall see, during prime time) and an impressive stable of talent (though neither of its two most significant assets, Christiane Amanpour and Jeff Greenfield, popped up during my five hours of viewing). But when the programming becomes progressively more awful as the evening wears on -- and, presumably, as more people come home from work and are able to watch -- what good are standards and talent?

CNN's oddest shortcoming has always been its lack of a signature newscast. NewsStand was intended as a signature show, but it wasn't a newscast. The World Today was a newscast, but it was too low-key to be a signature show. With both those programs now gone, the closest thing CNN has now to a prime-time newscast is Inside Politics, broadcast from 5 to 6:30 p.m. and anchored by Judy Woodruff and, until recently, Bernie Shaw. Make no mistake: this is the real deal. The evening I watched, Inside Politics offered in-depth reporting on stories ranging from the Bush tax plan to the swearing-in of Israel's new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, as well as live updates on the high-school shooting in Santee, California. In addition, Woodruff interviewed Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao on the Republican vote to dump workplace ergonomic rules (Chao stuck like a robot to her bland talking points), and a few talking-heads segments were thrown in starring Bob Novak, the "Carlson Twins" (the unrelated Margaret and Tucker), and political analyst Bill Schneider (on Arnold Schwarzenegger's non-campaign for governor of California).

Not bad. But who is watching television at 5 p.m. other than children and shut-ins? (It doesn't repeat anymore, not even in the midnight-to-6 a.m. ghetto.) After Inside Politics, CNN goes with financial news until 7:30 p.m., when its hideous prime-time line-up kicks in. From 7:30 to 8 p.m., the superannuated Crossfire stupefies, long past its tolerable glory days, when Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan offered a bit of intelligence. The current hosts, Bill Press and Bob Novak, are no dummies, but they serve up mere shtick. On Wolf Blitzer Reports (8 to 8:30 p.m.), the amiable host stands outside and chitchats harmlessly with fellow reporters and politicians, thus spending virtually none of AOL's money -- which, I guess, is the whole idea. On The Point (8:30 to 9 p.m.), the bright but screechy Greta Van Susteren presides over panels of bright but screechy guests, reducing complicated issues such as whether to try juveniles as adults to bone-headed one-liners.

The heart of CNN's line-up remains Larry King Live (9 to 10 p.m.), perhaps best known as the launching pad for Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign and for the Perot-Al Gore debate over NAFTA. King is often faulted for his softball questions, and his hero worship is such that recently his fed-up colleague John King circulated an internal e-mail expressing "shame and horror" at King's suck-up performance at a Bush inaugural event. But I think Larry gets a bad rap. At his best, he gives interesting people a chance to talk in the presence of a host whose ego is secure enough that he doesn't feel the constant need to show off. Unfortunately, King's style places him entirely at the mercy of his guests, and tonight's are horrendous: Steve and Marlene Aisenberg, a couple recently cleared of staging the kidnapping of their baby from their suburban Tampa home. Needless to say, not everyone believes in the Aisenbergs' innocence, and the show degenerates into a shouting match between missing-children activist Marc Klaas ("As we speak, your story is changing!") and the Aisenbergs.

CNN Tonight (10 to 10:30 p.m.) is a newscast lite, and most likely a placeholder: Jeff Greenfield will reportedly get this time slot, and he's got the intelligence to do something with it. But what can I say about The Spin Room (10:30 to 11 p.m.), which CNN is promoting heavily? Bill Press isn't funny, and he desperately wants to be. Tucker Carlson is a talented young political writer and -- I can attest -- a certified good guy; but here he comes across as a bow-tied twit. They spend a few moments kicking around Barbra Streisand, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the corpse of Harold Stassen before ushering the aforementioned Jim Traficant onto the set. What's disturbing is that Press and Carlson seem to have no idea how bad their show is. After Traficant leaves, Carlson looks into the camera and declares with an air of self-satisfaction, "Here we are marinating in the afterglow of Jim Traficant's appearance." Well, Tucker, maybe you are, but we aren't.

The Spin Room is supposed to be interactive, so chat-room comments are displayed during the show, and Carlson and Press read viewer e-mails at the end. It's as cutting-edge as AOL itself, the plain vanilla of the Internet, and about as enlightening as you'd expect.

A HIGH-school student named Charles Andrew Williams has killed two classmates in Santee, California. And Ashleigh Banfield, the rising young star of MSNBC, is riding it hard. "If I'm not mistaken, he looked like he hadn't slept a wink," she says, speaking of Williams's arraignment as gravely as she can manage, her eyes radiating empathy behind her $400 Lafont titanium-frame glasses. Over the course of the next hour, Banfield will exploit the tragedy by playing the Linkin Park song "One Step Closer" ("Is it possible that Williams in some way may have been influenced by it?") and by asking of the viewers back home: "How certain are you that your teenager may not snap under certain conditions?"

Who says all cable news stations are alike? On an evening that CNN and Fox devote mainly to Cheney's heart and Bush's tax cut, MSNBC -- a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News -- is going wall-to-wall with school shootings, not just in Santee but across the nation. It is the ideal venue for Ashleigh Banfield, the very young, very attractive anchor whom MSNBC has been pushing to front and center since the Florida imbroglio brought her to prominence.

Banfield is not without talent or intelligence (after all, she works in a medium in which wearing glasses is prima facie evidence of intelligence); but she comes across as someone who only recently mastered the conventions of local news anchoring. The Dallas Observer, the alternative weekly in the city where Banfield got her start, once described her style this way: "I make a sad face when I talk about death and a happy face when I talk about multicultural events." Her new show, MSNBC Live (7 to 8 p.m.), is a sprightly romp through the day's news, with her co-anchor, Lester Holt, standing by in Santee. The best that you can say is that it's not terrible, but the glitz and graphics wear after a while.

MSNBC is a strange creature: its financial-news sibling, CNBC, is actually available in more homes and gets higher ratings. So MSNBC goes with its most popular show, Chris Matthews's Hardball, from 5 to 6 p.m., then repeats it on CNBC in prime time at 8 p.m. That means that during the crucial 8-to-9 p.m. time slot, MSNBC is up against its own Hardball and Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, now the highest-rated show in cable news. So what does MSNBC do? Dive for the bottom, with an execrable mess called MSNBC Investigates. Tonight: "Crimes Caught on Tape," a gruesome hour of helicopter chases and convenience-store-video footage, highlighted by two heavy exchanges of gunfire (one fatal) and a tape of semi-nude women who'd been assaulted in Central Park.

As for Matthews himself, the man is a loudmouth and something of a buffoon, but he knows politics and he knows how to keep a talk show moving. And though he often engages his mouth while his brain is still idling ("That kid looks pretty cute, I don't know what his problem is," he says while Andy Williams's arraignment is being aired), he also makes some good points about the horrors of bullying and the cowardice of the Democrats, who have backed away from gun control. He also interviews Senate Budget Committee chairman Pete Domenici about the Bush tax cut, and tries harder to push Domenici off his talking points than most hosts would dare.

The second hour of Hardball (6 to 7 p.m.), hosted by Mike Barnicle, is -- how to put this? -- less successful. The low-energy Barnicle, mailing it in from a satellite studio in Watertown, smugly repeats over and over that the problem with school shootings lies "in the home." At one point he intones mindlessly that society is "seriously warped" because "kids have more access to handguns than to praying in public schools." Please.

The single best program on MSNBC is The News with Brian Williams (9 to 10 p.m.), the signature newscast that CNN so obviously lacks. Williams is a terrific anchor -- sharp, serious, authoritative, quick on his feet. Unfortunately, the newscast over which he presides is thin and cheap. On this evening, Williams offers up more -- much more -- on the school shootings, a new poll (with Tim Russert) showing that the Clintons' approval ratings are in the toilet, the latest on Cheney's heart, a medical study showing that aspirin may prevent ovarian cancer, and a bid by the widow of Dale Earnhardt to keep autopsy photos out of the hands of the press. Reported pieces are few and short; talking-heads segments are long. Both CNN's Inside Politics and Fox's Special Report offer considerably more depth and journalistic firepower. It's a tribute to Williams's professionalism that The News offers the impression of substance. Give Williams the night off and substitute, say, Ashleigh Banfield, and the same newscast would look light enough to float away.

Speaking of light enough to float away -- The News repeats on CNBC at 10, so MSNBC cuts out early, broadcasting a Matt Lauer vehicle called Headliners & Legends. Tonight! Woody Harrelson!

No thanks. I'd rather watch Behind the Music.

IT LOOKS as though Bill O'Reilly has gone off the right-wing reservation. O'Reilly is grilling C. Boyden Gray about the pardon his former boss, George H.W. Bush, gave to Caspar Weinberger eight years ago. Wasn't it as bad as the pardon Bill Clinton gave to Marc Rich? demands O'Reilly. Didn't Bush act because he was afraid Weinberger would tell what Bush knew about the Iran-contra affair? But O'Reilly -- who calls his show "a no-spin zone," and who eagerly intones Fox's "fair and balanced" mantra -- can keep up the façade no longer. Not to worry, he assures Gray: "I'm just putting forth what the propaganda is."

The Fox News Channel, the brainchild of international media mogul Rupert Murdoch, plays an interesting game: it's clearly pitched to conservatives, yet head honcho Roger Ailes -- a former Republican operative -- resolutely insists that his channel does not indulge conservative biases. It's not that Fox is conservative; it's that CNN and MSNBC are liberal, whereas Fox is balanced. "We report, you decide" is Fox's oft-repeated slogan. Got it?

Actually, leaving aside the matter of whether the competition is liberal, there is something to Fox's claim of being balanced -- at least when it's reporting the news. From 6 to 7 p.m., Brit Hume presides over the newscast Special Report. It is as serious and substantive as Inside Politics, featuring reported pieces on subjects such as Cheney's heart, North Korea, the tax cut, and the like. The talking-heads panel is balanced, with conservative Fred Barnes, moderate Morton Kondracke, and liberal Mara Liasson.

There is an attempt to focus more on Bush himself, who's barely visible on the other channels; and the show does feature such conservative-friendly bits as a Bloomberg poll showing that Americans approve of the tax cut by a two-to-one margin, a piece on Jesse Jackson's questionable finances (a perfectly legitimate story), and an in-studio Hume interview with Lionel Chetwynd, the director of Varian's War and a self-professed "acolyte of Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol." But the main problem with Special Report, as with Inside Edition, is that it's over before most people are home from work.

Hume is followed by Fox's answer to Ashleigh Banfield -- Shepard Smith, the pretty-boy anchor of The Fox Report (7 to 8 p.m.), who presides over an exceedingly light newscast featuring entirely unsubstantiated allegations that human clones will have giant heads, a pregnant woman who helped rescue a man whose car had plunged into a lake, and some footage of folks in Western costumes dancing with their dogs.

It's really not until after Smith signs off that the conservative thing kicks in, but then it does so with a vengeance. The O'Reilly Factor (8 to 9 p.m.) is a cable phenomenon, reaching, according to Newsweek, some 1.5 million households. O'Reilly, who used to do mediocre commentary for Boston's WCVB-TV (Channel 5), has really come into his own, mainly through his ability to be endlessly glib, nuance and complexity be damned. "Why isn't the media asking questions of Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton?" he wants to know. "The most powerful black leader in the country is taking in tens of millions of dollars and his books are a mess." The Clinton pardons are "an outrage." The Democratic National Committee is "an outrage." O'Reilly grills a tax lawyer who advises nonprofit organizations. The lawyer's conclusion: Jackson should be audited. O'Reilly also treats his viewers to toe-sucker Dick Morris, who believes Clinton committed a felony by granting pardons in return for the expectation of future favors, and former Jackson associate Ron Daniels.

Daniels strikes at the heart of what's wrong with O'Reilly's methodology when O'Reilly suddenly says that Jackson can't account for "millions of dollars," then tells Daniels, "Thank you for coming in. I hope you think we've been fair." Responds a stunned Daniels: "You just dropped this missing-millions thing." How, Daniels asks, can he respond to a completely unsubstantiated charge of that nature? Well, whatever. Time for a commercial.

After The O'Reilly Factor comes Hannity & Colmes (9 to 10 p.m.), the mutant offspring of Crossfire, in which beefy conservative Sean Hannity plays the aggressor while angular liberal Alan Colmes is the foil. Actually, this is kind of an interesting evening: the ACLU's Nadine Strossen is on hand to talk about the cruelty of imposing the death penalty on the mentally retarded, and the pro-death Hannity actually agrees with her. Representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont appears to talk taxes, and responds to Hannity's insinuation that he's a "socialist" by saying that, well, yeah, he is. "I wanted to get it on the record for the first time," says Hannity, a statement that surely must have surprised Sanders's constituents, to whom his oft-expressed socialist views have long been public knowledge.

From 10 to 11 p.m., former Boston newswoman Paula Zahn hosts The Edge, and she manages to interview Jim Traficant (it must be Traficant Night; didn't MSNBC get the memo?) for several segments without his coming off as a lunatic. She also does an excellent bit on Chris Niemeyer, an evangelical Christian who was banned from delivering his high school's valedictory speech because of its religious content -- an outrageous (as O'Reilly would put it) example of censorship that the Reverend Barry Lynn, of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, is entirely unsuccessful in explaining away.

She closes, for some unknown reason, with professional wrestler Triple H, who blurts out, "I got to call you out on this -- what's with James Traficant's hair?"

ONCE UPON a time, television news was a unifying cultural force. From the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the moonwalk, from the Vietnam War to the peace deal between Israel and Egypt (brokered just as surely by Walter Cronkite as it was by Jimmy Carter), network news was a vital part of American life.

According to a recent report by the Associated Press, as recently as 20 years ago some 75 percent of households watched one of the Big Three network newscasts. Today, that figure is down to 44 percent.

Two trends are at work. First, surveys show that fewer and fewer people are interested in the news -- at least in the traditional political news that has always been a staple of the mainstream media. The network newscasts' remaining audience skews old, meaning that viewership is destined to keep shrinking. Newspaper circulation has been declining for years, newsmagazines struggle to hang on, and even local newscasts, the last to be affected by the anti-news trend, are losing viewers.

Second, this is the age of audience fragmentation. Those people who are interested in news now have an ever-increasing number of places to get it: cable TV, Internet news sources such as Slate, Salon, and the Drudge Report, and national newspapers that -- because of the Web -- are freely accessible to everyone for the first time in history.

Given such trends, it's no surprise that even the small cable news audience has fragmented into still smaller sub-audiences.

The history of television is the history of unfulfilled expectations. Early expectations that TV would be a potent force for education gave way to the "vast wasteland." Three networks grew into 57 channels with nothing on.

This past Tuesday, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, part of Harvard's Kennedy School, presented Ted Turner with a Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism. It must have been a difficult moment for Turner, who had the vision to create something truly great, only to watch it devolve into the same stupidity and banality that afflicts most of television.

It's not that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox are uniformly terrible, or that they don't perform a real service when there's news to be covered.

It's that they could be -- should be -- so much better.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.