Hildegarde

I have a very odd relationship to television.  I spent a lot of my life without it.  From the time I left home to live at school until I married Bill, I never owned one, and only lived with a roommate who owned one for about six months.  And over the course of the years since Bill died, I’ve cancelled out cable service for long periods on at least three occasions, usually because I thought the boys were watching too much of it.

And even when I’ve had television in the house, it’s often been off by decree.  For most of their younger school lives, Greg and Matt were not allowed to watch television at all (even on week-ends) during the term time (except for the news, which I watch), and they were only allowed to watch television during vacations if they could pass a quiz I’d set up for them first.  Every day.

One year, Greg couldn’t get permission to watch television during the summer until he was able to recite the Bill of Rights verbatin, explain them, and identify and give a summary of about 15 SCOTUS cases dealing with them.

If anybody ever came up to one of my children to do one of those surveys about “what Americans know,” they would NOT be among those who think that “from each according to his ability” is in the Bill of Rights, and they would be able to find the US on a globe.

Okay, whatever.  It’s one of those things.

I do watch television beyond the news sometimes, and what I seem to get sucked into are those long miniseries things–Band of Brothers, Boss, Political Animals–that all the mininetworks now seem to be very interested in producing.

My big favorite of these at the moment is a thing called The Newsroom, written and produced by Aaron Sorkin, who did the same for The West Wing.

But, me being me, I don’t watch these things when they’re on.  I almost never even know when they’re on.  I watch them when they hit the FOD, and then I watch episodes in bunches.

A couple of days ago, after I finished work, I ran about four episodes of The Newsroom in succession.  It’s very well done, even though, being by Aaron Sorkin, you can figure out the politics before  you start.  The rumor is that Sorkin researched the way a newsroom operates by investigating the operations of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, and you can sort of see it.  The main character (Will McAvoy) is played by Jeff Daniels, who sort of looks like Olbermann.  And the snippets we get of actual segments of the show sort of sound like Olbermann.

On the other hand, much as I loved Countdown while it was still on, I wouldn’t call it a news show, and I don’t think MSNBC called it that, either.

I don’t think even Olbermann himself would have called it that.

I am not going to recommend the show–a lot of you are just going to be annoyed by the politics.  Aaron Sorkin is Aaron Sorkin.  I think the term “liberal bubble” was invented just for him. 

For those of you who will not be annoyed by the politics, though–this thing is really, really, really well done.

And in this last set of episodes I watched, it also managed to bring up and interesting issue–something else Sorkin is good at, so good at that I keep wishing he’d develop more scope in his understanding of ideas.

It’s not the issue of news vs entertainment per se that comes up–although of course it does, as a foundation.  But the broad issue so described is about things like the doings of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, vs reports on the debt ceiling or the war in Iraq.

And on that level, the issue is easy to figure out.  Yes, what’s happening in the war in Iraq is Real News, and what is happening to Lindsay Lohan really is not.

On The Newsroom, however, what happens is this.  There’s a big story out there which the show is (as one character says) “too highbrow to cover,” and as a result, the show loses fully half its viewers to another station in the same time slot that is covering that story.

My problem is what the story is–it’s the Casey Anthony thing. 

Now, I have no problem at all with people who say that celebrity stories aren’t Real News, because I don’t think they are.  And that impression is getting stronger and stronger as the years go by and more and more of the “celebrities” are people I don’t recognize. 

But is it really the case that something like the Casey Anthony investigation and trial is not Real News?

It would seem to me that crime in general, and murder in particular, is almost the definition of Real News. 

This would be true without reservation in any local context.  One of the most important things the news does is to tell us what is happening to our friends and neighbors, and what is happening in our communities that could affect our lives.

And crime does, in fact, affect our lives.  We make different decisions about what to do and where to go based on whether or not we think the area and the activity is safe.  Crime rates are one of the things our local and state governments need to take into account when they make decisions about laws, about police presence, about lots of things.

Given that, the underlying assumption of the episode must have been that the Casey Anthony case was not Real News because the television program in question had national, rather than local or regional, reach–that is, that crime, and especially sensational crime and murder, is not information important for people to have if they live outside the locality where it occurred.

And in this, I think the show was just wrong.

I do understand the objections to the way in which the Casey Anthony case was covered by most news outlets. 

The approach taken by people like Nancy Grace–it’s her show that gets half of Will McAvoy’s audience when Will won’t cover Casey–

Anyway, I think the approach taken by people like Nancy Grace was in fact to turn the story into entertainment, to not so much report the facts as to make the entire thing into a circus.  See Casey Anthony’s hair in court today?  What does that say about her state of mind?  Look at her face–she shows no remorse at all!  There are rumors coming from reputable sources that say Casey Anthony intended to have an abortion and her parents forced her not to!

This sort of thing is not Real News, and I understand the position of a serious news program not to be involved with it.  In fact, I’ll go farther.  This sort of thing is not only not Real News, it’s destructive. It creates  a climate in which the general assumption is that you can “just tell” if the accused is guilty or not–he cried or he didn’t, he sat stonyfaced and that means he had no emotions.

But there is a difference between that kind of thing and the honest reporting of a story about a murder. 

And it’s not true, any longer, that such stories only concern the localities in which they happen.

This is most clear in the case of serial killers, who can be very mobile and operate in several states.  Ted Bundy, after all, murdered his victims in Washington state, Colorado, Michigan and Florida, to name just some.  That’s a national murder story if there every was one.

But even much more localized cases tell us something about the state of our nation and the characters of our fellow citizens.  They tell us what the pathologies are, and where they are.

They tell us where the fault line are.

We don’t, of course, pay attention to every local murder.  We know the stats on the usual stupid stuff.  The unusual ones, though, raise questions, and they’re questions we should be prepared to answer.

One of the characters on The Newsroom explained the appeal of the Nancy-Grace style reporting of these things as being one where the viewer could watch and tell herself:  that child deserved so much more than that mother gave her; she deserved a mother like ME.

And maybe that is the appeal of that kind of thing.  I tend to be bored by it, mostly because it feels repetitious and trivial.

But it’s one thing to say that the way some stories are reported is wrong.

And it’s another to say that those stories should not be reported at all.

Whatever Sorkin wants, the rest of us don’t turn into the news for economic analysis and policy debates to the exclusion of everything else happening on the planet.