ABC News – Cutting Workforce 20% – Suprising No One

[Nick Griffin]

[Mike Cohen] “And you have stock updates top right and lots of logos around the edges, so the content only takes up 30% of the screen.”

Jon Stewart did a very funny lampooning of this a couple of years after 9/11. One has to wonder how many Exec Producers and News Directors saw his satire and slowly started to cut it back.

I agree with most of what’s been said about local news. It sucks and it can be painful to watch good looking people who were plainly “C” students (or less) struggle with pronouncing the names of foreign leaders or capital cities. I mean, REALLY? People who deliver the news never WATCH the news?

But my “favorite” has to be the Today Show and their oh-so-sincere interviews with those in the news through some recent tragedy. Matt Lauer has questions along the lines of, “When you found out your wife had been killed, how did that make you feel?” HOW DID THAT MAKE YOU FEEL???? I understand that they’re attempting to reach the broadest audience possible, and it certainly isn’t me. That’s what drove me to Imus and now Joe Scarborough for my fix of morning noise.

Speaking of which, I find MSNBC to be far less objectionable and have fewer complete jerks than Fox does. MSNBC obviously bends to the left, but I’ve never seen them to be making things up as Fox seems to do with some regularity while claiming with a straight face to be so “fair and balanced.” But don’t get me started because, as is the case with the Congress, I believe one of the best ways to start to fix the mess that “news” programming has become would be to throw out everyone running it now and start over.

[Brian Tetamore]

Great conversation. Anyone familiar with Marshal McLuhan? “The medium is the message.” is one of his most well known contributions to media culture. One of the premises of his teachings is that technology has the power to profoundly change us, regardless of the content. Yes, our culture seems infatuated with the lower levels of human depravity. It is easier to passively allow someone else to tell us what to think rather then putting forth effort to reason and think about the world we live in. Still, I think it’s more than that.

McLuhan’s prophetic understanding of how TV – among many other things – would change us can be seen in the comments on this thread. Today’s visual medium emphasizes “emotion” over reason, and “speed” over context.

“quality sometimes comes in behind speed and cost”
“People watch screaming. End of story.”
“Television news is show business. And very little more.”
“Increasingly, the things going on in the world at large seems to have little to do with my life.”
“I think it remains extremely important to actually leave the house and interact with human beings face to face on a daily basis for a healthy dose of perspective.”

Millions of flashing pixels bombarding us every second. Truly at the speed of light. Video transcends time and space boundaries normally in play when we are chatting with friends at the local coffee shop. It cannot in and of itself convey meaning or context or place. The strength of this medium resides in it’s ability to stimulate the right side of the human brain, which is not good at thinking. I think we all agree that sensationalism and splashy fast paced images have become the norm even with genres like the news, where reason and thought are required to make informed and rational decisions. The viewer demands experience over logic, or is it because the medium demands it?

The web offers us access to billions of people’s opinions and experience. Some of them fiction. Some of them nonfiction. And it’s not a coincidence we call it the “web”. It’s a vast network of totally unrelated threads connected at random and once in a while on purpose. In the end, well actually there is no end. The internet seems to keep growing all on it’s own. At times, surfing the internet can be chaotic. Can our minds manage the billions of bits and bytes of information? Is it possible this medium has contributed to the nonlinear way that many of us now live?

I might as well end with McLuhan’s own quote (because he’s a whole lot smarter than me).

“We shape our powerful tools, and then they shape us.”

The Visual Rabbi
TheVisualChurch.com
“Crafting Visual Messages to Engage and Persuade”