When I was a young budding journalist, I remember going on a high school field trip to the Seattle Post Intelligencer. This was back when they were still downtown and the big world globe shone brightly on the bustling streets of Seattle. You could literally soak in the scent of fresh newsprint pouring from the building as old men sat bent over their linotype machines, hot lead turning into the hot news of the day.
Part of our visit included the daily news editor meeting. All the editors would meet in a smoky dimly lit room. There were all the section editors—News, Sports, Living, etc. —as well as the Editor in Chief. All the editors would pitch their stories of the day—the top news—and the Editor in Chief would make them really work for it. “That’s not news. That’s bullshit,” he would say. Then he’d move on down the list and around the room. Finally, with the deadline nearing, he’d call the meeting and the news of the day—all that was fit to print—would be locked and loaded for the linotype guys to hammer out.
It was a very different time, both in technology and news gathering. There was none of this television nonsense with “Late Breaking News” blaring across the screen, only to show you a very common traffic accident.
Until the invention of this pseudo-news technique, I think I’d only seen three news bulletins on TV in all my youth – the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Everything else waited for Walter Cronkite to report it to us, or Huntley and Brinkley. It was real journalism back then and these guys were hard as nails reporters and editors.
Today, there’s none of that. TV reporters have to be pretty to look at, their news gathering skills are questionable at best. They have become news readers, not true journalists who dug up and reported the news. Just watch the old news programs once and you’ll see that the real journalists—Cronkite, Sevareid, Chancellor, McGee, Reynolds—these were not attractive guys, but you believed them when they told you what was happening.
Today, I learned a new phrase for the jokers we call TV, radio and print reporters and journalists: Churnalists.
What a great word for what is passing as news today: Churnalism.
Case in point. Donald Trump is going through the whole birther nonsense again. He’s not only making the rounds on “news” programs, but he’s spinning nonsense that has already been proven wrong. Now, The Don isn’t guilty of churnalism, the editors and reporters who report on it are. They are simply churning the news, not vetting it for any facts or mistruths. It is churnalism at its best.
It’s certainly not journalism. I know the difference. I got a degree in journalism back in the days when All the President’s Men had come out showing how Woodward and Bernstein almost singlehandedly brought down the president for a third rate burglary and a monumental cover up.
If you ever watched the movie and met the real Woodward and Bernstein, you’d quickly find they looked nothing like Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. As I said, real newsmen, real journalists aren’t attractive. Why do you think so many of them ended up in radio?
Instead of thought provoking, fact based reporting, we’re left with churnalism in all its worthless, empty glory. Screw the facts. We’ll just run the sound bites of nonsense as Speaker of the House Boehner tries to congratulate himself on not shutting down the government or the video of Governor Rick Scott here in Florida running a mile to raise money for Special Olympics just before he gutted all funding for the disabled in Florida. And do I really care what Lindsay Lohan has to say about Betty White, who rightfully took her apart for her strung out antics?
I wish to God journalism never became a ratings game or had to kowtow to what the advertisers wanted to report. Or that in the desperate attempt to increase their paltry ratings, they invent news for the “Late Breaking” bulletins that conveniently appear minutes before the 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11 o’clock news. And don’t even get me started on local Fox TV programs who include bits about American Idol in the guise of news. Come on, folks!
I blame this all on CNN, of course. They really started all this crap. Maybe the C stands for Churnalism News Network. We never really needed a news station with 24 hours of news every single day. There simply isn’t that much news in the world worth reporting. I think you’ll agree on this point. So, instead we get the gold standard of churnalism – CNN. Think back to 9/11, Katrina or the Japan earthquake and you’ll truly know what churnalism is. The same footage shown over and over again. Then a tidbit of important information, followed by more of the same footage to kill time until the next tidbit. Thirty minutes of real news wrapped around 23 1/2 hours of recycled footage and inane call-ins and tweets from average people who Walter Chronkite wouldn’t even put on hold.
And we wonder why we have no perspective in our land. Churnalists are shoving faux news at us faster than we can take it in. Our brains become a whirlpool of information that lacks context or perspective. There’s no one telling us what’s important anymore—except the idiodic pundits who want to spin the world according to how they see it, complete with the requisite conspiracy theories and so-called subject matter experts who will say anything they’re told to say just to get a few minutes of airtime so they can hype their latest book, the name of which is conveniently scrolling along the bottom of the screen.
Am I a bit sour? A bit jaded? Perhaps. But the naybobs who call themselves journalists and reporters never got to see the real guys in action. Instead, they’re far more concerned about their coif, they’re perks and ratings than getting their facts straight.
And that, my friends, is a sad state for all of us. Churnalism is alive and well, and we should be very scared.
Out on the Treasure Coast, wishing the “Most trusted man in America” was still on CBS Evening News to tell me how it really is,
— Robb