WHY THE BROADCAST NEWS MEDIA IS SHIT NOWADAYS

Howard Beale: “…at the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept, writhing in its final pain.”

That line was delivered 47 years ago.

People on both sides of the political aisle complain about the “bias” of the mainstream media, both print and TV. Progressives sound like the conservatives of 30 years ago; nowadays one hears less from the Right, other than pro forma attacks, since they are mostly “in the bubble” created over the past 40 years by Conservatism, Inc.

Both are right.

A good place to begin understanding why the mainstream media is as fucked up as it is now, is to take another look at Paddy Chayevsky’s magnificent “Network,” which hit the theaters 48 years ago in 1976 and has only grown more relevant in the decades since. Chayevsky was once asked by an interviewer if the movie was a prediction of things to come. He answered, “No, I was writing about what’s there now.” What he wrote then was satire of what was on the nightly news; 48 years later, the film is nearly a documentary.

The important through line is the story of Howard Beale - who Peter Finch brought to life in one of the most amazing acting performances on film - who was once a dedicated journalist, one of “Murrow’s Boys,” the broadcast journalists who created what was seen at the time as the “gold standard” of what television news could be. But times have changed and so has Howard, and he now faces being fired for no longer bringing in viewers. Bringing in viewers has been the point of broadcast television in America since David Sarnoff first broadcast FDR speaking at the 1939 World’s Fair.

“Bringing in the viewers,” which is defined in the ratings each show gets, is the way in which broadcast TV has always made money. And this is now the problem, since high ratings mean high advertising rates on a show.

Ned Beatty’s Arthur Jensen, CEO of the corporation that owns the corporation that runs the UBS network, is the epitome of the “bottom line” executive. Whatever brings in the ratings is what UBS will do. Period. And despite any doubts about the ultimate good of those decisions, corporate executive Robert Duvall’s Frank Hackett (there was never a more appropriate name for such a character) will carry out his orders. William Holden’s Mx Schumacher, head of the UBS news division who goes back with Beale to the golden age, is the man left trying to hold back the incoming tide with a teaspoon.

On what is supposed to be his final appearance, Howard goes missing. He eventually arrives, do far beyond “drunk” there is no measuring, and delivers the greatest epic rant against “modernity” since Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal.” He ends with this: “…at the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept, writhing in its final pain,” and then says, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” And the viewers follow his order to throw open their windows and shout with him.

“They’re shouting!” changes everything.

Howard becomes The Prophet of the Airways. Every oddball and weirdo UBS can find turns up on the show. It’s top rated. Howard has saved the day. Fay Dunaway’s Diana Christensen - the most truly dangerous character in the story because she has no moral compass to limit what she does - goes f rom producing the show to running the Entertainment Division, which ultimately takes in what used to be the News Division.

Until the day he doesn’t. When he comes on the show and delivers a lecture on who is really in control of things, and how those corporations run things, and who profits from the misery -in other words, The Actual Truth - things change. Arthur Jensen tells Howard he has “messed with the basic forces of the universe,” a crime for which he will pay. And he does. He delivers the “prophecies” Arthur Jensen wants delivered. And the show dies. And Howard becomes “the man who died of low ratings.” Literally.

“Network” is the story of how the news became “entertainment,” which has only become more obvious in the years since. It’s also the story that says the Master of the Universe don’t really know what they are doing, that they’re just throwing it on the wall to see what sticks. Also something only more completely obvious in 2024 than 1976.

And that is the problem today. William Goldman’s Three Rules of Hollywood are now revealed as what they always were - the Three Rules of the Human Universe: Nobody. Knows. Anything.

They really don’t know anything, and it’s only more obvious every day.

What they do know terrifies them, because they don’t have an answer for it.

They’re all afraid they really will become “the man who died of low ratings.”

Disney owns ABC. NBC-Universal owns NBC. Paramount owns CBS. Warner Brothers Discovery owns CNN.

In all four cases, each company would love to find a way to get rid of these once-powerful media companies that are now minor wings of the intergalactic widget-makers. If Universal could get rid of NBC, they could buy Paramount and strip it of its profitable branches (not including CBS, which would eventually be loaded with debt and turned loose as an “independent”), adding them to the corporate behemoth that is NBC-Universal, which would allow them to get rid of Comcast, which is nothing more than the carrier of all the legacy broadcast stations and thus has no future the corporation cares to care about. WBD would love to get rid of CNN, which has been circling the bowl since David Zaslav made the genius decision to get rid of Jeff Zucker so he could satisfy his biggest investor-partner, the right winger John Malone, who wants CNN to become “Fox-lite.” Disney faces an “activist-investor” at its coming annual meeting in March; he says get rid of ABC and the rest of Disney’s “legacy media” companies. Sinclair Broadcasting, the right wing owner of the largest number of local news TV stations, would be happy to take ABC off Disney’s hands.

But the intergalactic widget-makers all have to make these companies profitable again, if they’re going to sell them off and get rid of them.

The ratings must improve.

All these news operations saw great ratings during the years of the Trumpocalypse - 2015-2021. All of them have seen their ratings tumble since. There’s no geek biting the heads off chickens on the six o’clock news to attract the eyeballs of all those either overjoyed to watch the geek eat the chicken heads, or those appalled by the sight, who tuned in when the geek was on every night back in the “good years” of the “high ratings.”

In 2016, Jeff Zuckerberg - head of CNN - was asked why CNN was giving all the free airtime to Trump by giving him wall-to-wall coverage of his hatealongs, er, I mean his political rallies. Zuck the Fuck (as he used to be known in Hollywood) replied, “Donald Trump gives us great ratings.” That was the only thing that mattered to him. He then proceeded to grab the viewers and keep the high ratings between 2017-2021 by making CNN part of “the resistance” to Trump.

And so, like Arthur Jensen at UBS, all these formerly-relevant companies are willing to run with anything that brings eyeballs.

And to do this, they have turned to the algorithm that has made Mark Zuckerberg rich. You get more “engagement” from viewers if there is “controversy” there to keep bringing them back. It’s why FarceBook hasn’t crashed and burned despite all the people who have left the swamp there. J6 was planned there!

And so we get all the “clickbait” stories about how the guy most likely to save the constitutional democratic republic that has created the conditions for the intergalactic widget-makers to become intergalactic widget-makers is a doddering old man running a hellscape economy that makes the Friday after Black Thursday 1929 look good while letting billions of “those people” free access across the southern border to destroy us.

Why do all the people who work at these place go along with all this?

There’s another good movie about The Media that will explain that. “Broadcast News,” released 37 years ago, made by that worthy successor to Paddy Chayevsky James L. Brooks is a great portait of people in the news business who are pretty much exactly like the ones who are there today, and how they respond to the prospect of coming change.

Which explains how MSNBC has become what it is: Clickbait Central for Progressives. And that’s not really working, because the ratings aren’t improving. They aren’t improving because I only have to watch one of the primetime shows to get all the “news” involved in whatever that day’s Big Story is - which will be stirred, shaken and re-poured in each of the primetime shows following. And all the people like me who are helping their ratings decrease by flipping over to whatever interesting show I recorded on MGM+ or Turner Classic Movies, lead to more desperate clickbait as MSNBC - and all the others - keep circling the bowl.

Anderson Cooper got it right (as well as pleading guilty for his own part) when he said of “Network,” “You can watch poorly performed knockoff versions of Howard Beale’s ‘mad as hell’ speech every night nowadays on any number of cable networks Except I believed Howard Beale’s emotion when he gave that speech. I don’t believe those who now attempt to stir anger and outrage every night. Because it is popular, it becomes shtick, which is what happened to Beale’s outrage as well.”

And that is why the news is shit. The only story worse than this one is the story of what has happened to the legacy print media, where even Jeff Bezos has decided he can’t just keep the Washington Post afloat as a public service.

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