Changing the Way We Do Things

About a week ago, I read that ratings for TV News programs are dropping due to "weak lead-in programming." My first reaction was, "What do you mean 'lead-in programming?' It's the freakin' news! I thought it was the lead-in programming!" And maybe that used to be the case.

Also during the last week, I've read Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction, a recently released book about our ever-growing celebrity obsession by NPR correspondant Jake Halpern. I recommend this book to anyone who's ever received career advice (including from me) along the lines of "move to LA." It's full of great research and observations about what drives the modern media, and where it's going.

Anyway, there is a point to all this. Among other things, Fame Junkies comments on the disproportional amount of time that news programs give to celebrities. For instance, I remember sitting in an airport back in February and hearing the "breaking news" that Anna Nicole Smith had died. There wasn't any real significance to this event beyond the fact that she'd died; we didn't know how, and wouldn't know for another month, and for the moment it didn't have any major implications, but I heard more about Anna Nicole Smith that day than any living person.

The reason news programs do this is because they have to. Their ratings are falling, and however culturally disappointing it is, celebrity news gets ratings. The problem is that--let's be honest--it's never going to get the kind of ratings that these programs need. If we really want celebrity news, we have dozens of other shows, not to mention a few entire networks, to get it from. And those networks don't show "depressing" stuff about Iraq and social security and the environment; in essence, exactly the stuff that most people looking for celebrity news don't want to hear about.

What can we do? Here's my opinion, extreme as it may be:

Mainstream TV news is obsolete, along with a growing list of other traditional media forms. People who want hard news don't like it because it feeds into frivolous celebrity culture, and people who want celebrity news don't like it because it's a drag. You can't market hard news to celebrity junkies, or vice versa. You just can't. And we should stop trying.

I'm not saying that TV news needs to disappear; it just needs to scale back. Major networks need to make up their minds and show either hard news shows or celebrity shows. There should be a few hard news shows for people who want hard news, and maybe one for people who want Fox *ahem* er, fake news. Not as many people will watch them as used to, but that's the way it is.

There's two ways to sell anything: the first is to try and make people want what you make. The second is to just make what people want. What we need is less of the former and more of the latter. What it'll take to make this happen is for some people in the industry to have some guts for once and push things outside the comfort zone of What We've Always Done. Hint, hint.