Lou Dobbs' War on Journalism
An Informative Look at the Uniform Hype of Cable News
Matthew Sauvage
4/10/07 | Nation
On Wednesday, March 28, Lou Dobbs made his splash onto GW’s campus, shooting a segment of his program at the Jack Morton Auditorium. The show was quintessential Dobbs, treating the subject of drug and alcohol use on college campuses with the same amount of sensationalism he usually does for immigration or outsourcing (which Dobbs calls “the war on the middle class”). Acting as defender of all that is good and true, rather than an objective moderator, Dobbs—who must by now fancy himself a veteran war reporter—fearlessly reported on his subject in a program titled “The War Within”
This program exemplified how cable news shows are failing the public. The show should have asked deep and probing questions about the issue. Rather than delving into the issue by exhaustively examining facts and logically sorting them out, however, the show made a pit stop at talking point headquarters and stayed there for the entire episode.
Many different guests with varying backgrounds were invited to the show, including Dr. Nora Volkow from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Joseph Califano of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, among others. All of these guests promoted negative views of drug and alcohol use. But every part of the broadcast was another moment for Dobbs to get up on his soap box and let the American viewer know that he believes drugs and alcohol are but another war on our college students. No one truly challenged Dobbs with dissenting viewpoints. Tough questions were supplanted by Dobbs’ apocalyptic talking points on the issue.
The result was just sixty minutes of Dobbs’ using his guests as sounding boards for his own views. None of the experts were given sufficient time to speak. As one might guess, the show was spiced up with typical polarizing rhetoric from Dobbs like “Our kids are wasting away,” and “Drugs are truly weapons of mass destruction.”
Despite the negative effects that hard drugs and alcohol abuse have on young people, the effects of mild marijuana use and underage alcohol use are nil in comparison. I haven’t done the study yet, but I happen to be much more concerned by the prospect of plutonium in the hands of a terrorist than a joint in the hands of a college student. The shock value rhetoric which is commonplace in TV journalism does nothing more than produce warped opinions and a shallow understanding of topics.
Unfortunately, Dobbs has become a microcosm of the trend of cable news reporting. At the end of the day, cable news is seeking ratings via shock-jocks and poor reporting rather than expansive journalism and truth-seeking.
Despite Dobbs’ fear-mongering, there is no war on the middle class. Whatever your beliefs on immigration, insurgents are surely more dangerous to our country than people wanting to come here to start a better life. There is no “war within” American colleges, but there certainly is a real war in Iraq and Afghanistan against radical Islam.
GW professor of Media and Public Affairs and a contributing editor at CNN, Frank Sesno, describes this trend toward “cult personalities” who inject their personal opinions in news stories as an increasing troubling phenomenon, not only in television but in print media as well.
“It depends on the issue and the personality, but when the show is more about the person than news, the person becomes a demogogue and that becomes a problem,” says Sesno. He explains that keeping the attention of the viewer is a “serious challenge” that leads news companies to “appeal to the lowest common denominator.” Thus the desire for high ratings leads news organizations to promote sensationalism at the expense of hard reporting.
Dobbs and others have allowed their boisterous personalities to overtake the news business because it has become a popular and lucrative trend. Despite all of this, Sesno still believes that there are “still excellent bastions of journalism.” The biggest problem he says is when there is a fusion of fact, opinion, or partisanship into the news, leading to situations where the viewer is not told or is unaware of what is being presented. He used the example of Lou Dobbs’s show on CNN where Lou uses factual reporting alongside his own opinion. Professor Sesno says that “CNN is counting on the audience to be able to know the difference between opinion and fact.” He believes that having facts and opinion inside journalism is good for the industry but we “need to know the difference” because “if opinion overtakes reporting and overshadows fact there is no building block for judgment.”
While the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) liberal bias of the big networks may have a greater effect on swaying public opinion than the new era of shock-jock TV personalities, demagogic newscasters are still a troubling sign of where American media is heading. Whether the news is being delivered by a populist like Dobbs, or angry partisans like Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly, it is bad when opinionated personalities become the centerpiece of news coverage.
Of course, in my opinion, I would never want some big-government solution to the problem, mandating equal time for opinions or some new bureaucracy that searches for bias. Perhaps it is time, however, for TV journalists to start a new trend towards objectivity or for the public to turn the TV off altogether and dig deeply into a plethora of sources ranging from newspapers, magazines, and maybe even articles from journals and think tanks.
Essentially, we need to broaden our horizons. But most of the responsibility still lies with the news networks. “It is still their job to uphold the first principle of journalism: seeking the truth and being responsible to the public,” says Professor Sesno. He does admit, however, that “it is easy to beat the living daylights out of the news business,” implying that the public has a responsibility as well to “be their own executive producer and journalist.”
There’s nothing wrong with reading news from openly conservative or liberal individuals, but someone like Bill O’Reilly hardly does justice to conservative ideas by spouting his daily talking points and then gabbing about Anna Nicole Smith’s death for twenty minutes. And conservatives should strive to listen to the best liberal thinkers, rather than hacks like Keith Olberman. If we as television viewers don’t end our reliance on cable “news” for our information we as a country will be hurt by sensationalism and political partisanship.
Matt Sauvage is a freshman majoring in international affairs.
This program exemplified how cable news shows are failing the public. The show should have asked deep and probing questions about the issue. Rather than delving into the issue by exhaustively examining facts and logically sorting them out, however, the show made a pit stop at talking point headquarters and stayed there for the entire episode.
Many different guests with varying backgrounds were invited to the show, including Dr. Nora Volkow from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Joseph Califano of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, among others. All of these guests promoted negative views of drug and alcohol use. But every part of the broadcast was another moment for Dobbs to get up on his soap box and let the American viewer know that he believes drugs and alcohol are but another war on our college students. No one truly challenged Dobbs with dissenting viewpoints. Tough questions were supplanted by Dobbs’ apocalyptic talking points on the issue.
The result was just sixty minutes of Dobbs’ using his guests as sounding boards for his own views. None of the experts were given sufficient time to speak. As one might guess, the show was spiced up with typical polarizing rhetoric from Dobbs like “Our kids are wasting away,” and “Drugs are truly weapons of mass destruction.”
Despite the negative effects that hard drugs and alcohol abuse have on young people, the effects of mild marijuana use and underage alcohol use are nil in comparison. I haven’t done the study yet, but I happen to be much more concerned by the prospect of plutonium in the hands of a terrorist than a joint in the hands of a college student. The shock value rhetoric which is commonplace in TV journalism does nothing more than produce warped opinions and a shallow understanding of topics.
Unfortunately, Dobbs has become a microcosm of the trend of cable news reporting. At the end of the day, cable news is seeking ratings via shock-jocks and poor reporting rather than expansive journalism and truth-seeking.
Despite Dobbs’ fear-mongering, there is no war on the middle class. Whatever your beliefs on immigration, insurgents are surely more dangerous to our country than people wanting to come here to start a better life. There is no “war within” American colleges, but there certainly is a real war in Iraq and Afghanistan against radical Islam.
GW professor of Media and Public Affairs and a contributing editor at CNN, Frank Sesno, describes this trend toward “cult personalities” who inject their personal opinions in news stories as an increasing troubling phenomenon, not only in television but in print media as well.
“It depends on the issue and the personality, but when the show is more about the person than news, the person becomes a demogogue and that becomes a problem,” says Sesno. He explains that keeping the attention of the viewer is a “serious challenge” that leads news companies to “appeal to the lowest common denominator.” Thus the desire for high ratings leads news organizations to promote sensationalism at the expense of hard reporting.
Dobbs and others have allowed their boisterous personalities to overtake the news business because it has become a popular and lucrative trend. Despite all of this, Sesno still believes that there are “still excellent bastions of journalism.” The biggest problem he says is when there is a fusion of fact, opinion, or partisanship into the news, leading to situations where the viewer is not told or is unaware of what is being presented. He used the example of Lou Dobbs’s show on CNN where Lou uses factual reporting alongside his own opinion. Professor Sesno says that “CNN is counting on the audience to be able to know the difference between opinion and fact.” He believes that having facts and opinion inside journalism is good for the industry but we “need to know the difference” because “if opinion overtakes reporting and overshadows fact there is no building block for judgment.”
While the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) liberal bias of the big networks may have a greater effect on swaying public opinion than the new era of shock-jock TV personalities, demagogic newscasters are still a troubling sign of where American media is heading. Whether the news is being delivered by a populist like Dobbs, or angry partisans like Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly, it is bad when opinionated personalities become the centerpiece of news coverage.
Of course, in my opinion, I would never want some big-government solution to the problem, mandating equal time for opinions or some new bureaucracy that searches for bias. Perhaps it is time, however, for TV journalists to start a new trend towards objectivity or for the public to turn the TV off altogether and dig deeply into a plethora of sources ranging from newspapers, magazines, and maybe even articles from journals and think tanks.
Essentially, we need to broaden our horizons. But most of the responsibility still lies with the news networks. “It is still their job to uphold the first principle of journalism: seeking the truth and being responsible to the public,” says Professor Sesno. He does admit, however, that “it is easy to beat the living daylights out of the news business,” implying that the public has a responsibility as well to “be their own executive producer and journalist.”
There’s nothing wrong with reading news from openly conservative or liberal individuals, but someone like Bill O’Reilly hardly does justice to conservative ideas by spouting his daily talking points and then gabbing about Anna Nicole Smith’s death for twenty minutes. And conservatives should strive to listen to the best liberal thinkers, rather than hacks like Keith Olberman. If we as television viewers don’t end our reliance on cable “news” for our information we as a country will be hurt by sensationalism and political partisanship.
Matt Sauvage is a freshman majoring in international affairs.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Rob Howard
posted 4/16/07 @ 3:18 PM EST
Wow how insightful
Post a Comment