Pseudo News Shows

Americans today are awash in news from newspapers, publications of every variety, books, broadcast television stations, radio stations, and cable, including 24-hour cable new outlets such as CNN, C-Span, and CNN Headline News. Yet, the question is raised as to how trustworthy all this news is and especially as to how true a picture of society is presented in these many news broadcasts. The question is raised in part because of the growing apathy apparent in the electorate and because of opinion polls which indicate that "many citizens--perhaps the majority--live in a state of confusion and ignorance about government and political issues." Several reasons can be cited as to why this situation developed, but one reason has been the increasing trivialization of the news and the dedication of more and more time to celebrity news, titillation, and what has come to be called infotainment, entertainment masquerading as news. Infotainment permeates programming including talk shows, tabloid shows featuring celebrity news and crime stories, "reality" shows where camera crews follow police and other law enforcement professionals on their rounds, and similar programs. Over the history of television, most of these forms have always existed, but more and more tabloid thinking has taken over and replaced more solid news reporting. Local news has taken on a tabloid patina with flashy crime stories, police chases, and scandals replacing reporting on local and state issue

rs by over-eager producers caused the networks to seek to comply and to show themselves to be more public-spirited by increasing news budgets and giving more attention to news broadcasts. The government indeed pressured the networks to do just this, with John Doerfer, head of the FCC, in the lead: Doerfer told them [the networks] that the administration was prepared to preserve the industry from some of the more rugged new regulatory restrictions being discussed in Congress. However, the networks had to pledge to expand their coverage of public affairs, which had shrunk to virtually nothing beyond the fifteen-minute nightly news shows and the news component of the breakfast shows. LOCAL NEWS While the forces operating on network television and network news are similar to those at the local level, there are differences, and local news developed separately from the network variety even as local stations emulated national methods in some degree. Jeff Kisseloff offers a history of KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, a station that began operating experimentally as W6XYZ in 1941 and that went commercial in 1947 with its new call letters of KTLA. Klaus Landsberg was then the station manager. He had worked at the fledgling DuMont network i