“Hear ye, hear ye!”

 

   “Hear ye, hear ye!”

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA), Oct. 22, 2022

To assess fairly the national news media, it’s necessary to separate the cable news “shows” from the “nightly news” on ABC, CBS, and NBC.

            Back when the earth was cooling off, my first extended exposure to national television news was in a college dormitory lobby. My family had never had television. Radio was our joyful conduit to the outside world. For four years in college I haunted the dorm lobby at 6 PM and 11 PM to watch the news.  My obsession was genetic. Particularly, it was my father’s fault. He could tell you why Hoover should never have been elected, why Adlai Stevenson lost to “that Republican general,” and why FDR stood just beneath the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

To me news was history in the make, and the most important reason for studying history was to learn how things came to be as they are. Even though history books taught me much about the world in which I lived, it made sense to me to try to keep up with current events and then see how textbook writers and historians reported and characterized those events.

Alas, I learned early on that television newscasters often tinctured the news in a way that most newspapers never had. In newspapers, opinion was reliably on the editorial page and readers could typically expect news to be fact-based. When Turner Catledge, a fellow Mississippian and executive editor of the New York Times, came to little but beloved East Central Jr. College in Decatur, Mississippi he bid the college newspaper staff to “tell the truth and don’t tell it slant.”  He was referencing and respectfully twisting a poem by Emily Dickinson titled “Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant,” an excellent poem that deals not with the delivery of news generally but with the care one should take when delivering bad news. “The Truth must dazzle gradually,” Dickinson wrote, “Or every man be blind.”

Catledge, who had just moved from managing editor to executive editor of the NYT, told the aspiring junior college journalists that the expression “Hear ye, hear ye” was not originally a cry of boys delivering the newspaper but of medieval messengers announcing the imminent appearance of a king or queen. “But it still fits,” he said, “because journalists are announcers of the truth.” Catledge was long known for sticking to the belief that the purpose of a newspaper is to inform. Today’s New York Times is a far cry from the policy and practice of its venerable editor Turner Catledge who died in 1982.

So what about television news?  It was clear to me, normally sitting alone in the college dorm lobby with my 18-to-21-year-old not fully developed mind that television news was quite different from printed news. While CBS’s news anchor Walter Cronkite seemed balanced, his sidekick commentator Eric Sevareid, would always pull the news leftward, as would CBS’s Mike Wallace. Anchor Howard K. Smith of ABC was also a straight, informing newscaster but not so the liberal Barbara Walters. NBC grumpies Huntley and Brinkley aspired to balance but not so John Chancellor who succeeded them.

Even before cable news came along, the mainstream networks were straying from straight news. On to today, one would be hard pressed to say that Lester Holt of NBC, David Muir of ABC, or Norah O’Donnell of CBS are straight informers, given their added comments to news segments and to their after-work pronouncements about various social issues.

            How then does one separate and rightly size up the objectivity of television news? The evening shows of Fox, Newsmax, OAN, MSNBC, and CNN are news “shows”, centered on ideological commentary pure and simple, and should be judged as such. Supposedly the old line networks are straight news, yet NBC has joined the bandwagon of saying “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women” and “fetuses” instead of “babies.” With which ideological side does that line up? All three networks visibly relished their coverage of the “Russia, Russia” collusion hoax throughout Trump’s campaign and term in office. CBS and ABC showed absolute partiality during its coverage of the Roe v. Wade Court decision and its pre-announcement leak. All three networks have hidden behind the veneer of their “fact-checking” which always “reveals” that conservatives are in the wrong.

            So the “real news” guys are not clean as a hound’s tooth after all. Corporate media  quickly disposed of the Hillary Clinton emails, only to launch its ongoing avalanche against her Trump-supporting deplorables. Perhaps they should cry “Hear ye, hear ye” and admit that they are news shows and that commentary is their game. It might even help their poor ratings.

 

Roger Hines

October 20, 2022