Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Watching the Eye Witness News Notes

Jimmy Cagney's famous question: “What do you hear? What do you know?”
What we hear when we consume "the news" has only the most minimal relationship
to what we know about anything
...


Local news is the “infotainment monster” that ate the news industry


Infotainment: “television or radio programs that treat factual material in an
entertaining manner, as by including dramatic elements
...
(To attract
people/make them want to watch
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Neither was the intelligence or diversity of
the audience
...

 Ignoring different groups might want different kinds of information and
analysis
...

Local news today is the single most profitable form of nonfiction television
programming in the country and, for most stations/channels, the only thing they
actually produce
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(In other words Local news caused a phenomenon where they sugar coat the real
news to audiences for higher ratings)
Showing images of a false (wannabe) community (pseudo-community) called
“America”
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“If it bleeds, it leads” is the motto of the commercial news industry and local news
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So much of our news is personally terrifying and depressing, so it needs to be
delivered as cleverly and carefully as possible
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When wars are declared or covered, when elections are won or lost, when federal budgets
and plant closings do away with jobs and services or threaten to put more and more of us
in jail, for smaller causes, the local news teams are there to calm our jagged nerves and
reassure us that we don’t need to worry
...



They fill the “hard news” hole of the rest of the show with sound bites (a short
clip from a recorded interview, chosen for its sharp attention grabbing ability or
appropriateness) and headshots, altered by the networks, to be considered
"newsworthy”

Hard news affecting local communities takes up only a minute
 or two more of airtime
than national events
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Neighbors on local TV are forever gasping and wailing the most stereotypical of
reflex responses to actual local horrors, whether personal or social
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The local news teams' way of presenting such community responses is
deliberately forced and unreal
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And if someone
managed to come up with something serious and intelligent, rest assured it would
be cut in favor of a more sensational, emotional response
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

Because these two things are what people are most likely to pay attention to
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They want this because they find little of those things in the streets and buildings
they inhabit every day
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” (¶ 17)

Sociologist Joshua Gamson said in an insightful essay, that there is a lesson to be
learned from the enormous popularity of tabloid television, a category in which I
would certainly include local news
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On the
contrary, it is those responsible for the quality of our public life who are more
deserving of such terms of dishonor and disgrace
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"
(In other words: When people view public life with little importance and
insignificance, it is then when they accept watching the news
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Which is where that role that local
news plays of sugar coat messenger comes into play
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What people are getting from local newscast, is indeed what they want,
 in the most
profound and sad sense of that phrase
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
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They are getting, for a brief moment, a utopian fantasy of a better, kinder, more
decent and meaningful world than the one that entraps them
...

For that reason they are more troubling than the silliest of pop-culture fictions

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