TV critic Bill Goodykoonts of the Arizona Republic makes a good point about the news format in his review of Anchorman. (“Making fun of TV news is laughably all too easy,” 07/09/04)

But his real point is how bad the local TV news format is. “How do you parody something that’s practically a parody to begin with?” he asks. The movie doesn’t quite do that, he explains, pointing to post seventies ‘news’ techniques that are so ripe for parody” He cites how the common techniique of shooting a reporter in front of a darkened courthouse where a hearing took place six hour before that, the ‘breaking news’ that’s nothing more than a traffic accident that the camera crew were able to catch before airtime…

My point in bringing this up is to focus on how uninteresting and irrelevant TV news has become. Not only is it late (most stories have been covered in depth, and many times on radio before the 5 O’clock or 6 o’clock news) but the presentation style is still stuck in the old broadcast model, where one size fits nobody, where the story is no more than an expanded headline, and where the footage is pathetic.

That’s where ‘the new PR’ will be drawn to, and waste no time over outdated models. News TV news programs make the faulty assumption that people don’t have the same attention spans, and interest as before. Listen to someone who keeps people riveted. Jerry Seinfeld, quoted in the Wall Street Journal:

“There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing…People have infinite attention spans if you are entertaining them.” He’s an entertainer, so he focuses on that aspect.

The news format, of course has to modify that:

“People have infinite attention spans if you are informing them.”

As Howard Rheingold put it in a speech to a graduating class at Stanford, recently,

“The long and honorable history of American journalism is traveling through the digestive tract of the disinfotainment industry.”

He must have had the six O’ clock news in mind.