The news director is the person who runs the news operation at a television station or network. They are the ones who choose what you see as “news” on television. In the US in 2013, only 4% were Black.
News directors are driven by two main things:
- Ratings – how many people watch their show. This is the number they live or die by.
- Pictures – What makes good television news is what makes a good picture. Thus all those fires and wars and wanted criminals and ribbon-cutting ceremonies and not, say, the dry-as-dust stuff of government policy. “If it bleeds, it leads.”
Some would add a third thing:
- Watchdog groups, like Media Matters, which watch to see if shows cover the news unfairly. I would not count them because they seem to have little effect. The Sunday morning news talk shows, for example, lean as much to the right as they ever did. Fox News is even worse.
To get their ratings up, they often hire a news consultant. Despite the name, news consultants do not know much about news. What they do know is how to run focus groups, small groups of people who represent the Target Demographic that advertisers want to reach (aka White people who can afford new cars) and see what they think of different news presenters and reporters. Some of them have video of almost every television news reporter in the country. This is why many people on the news seem to have more beauty than brains.
Where news directors get news from (in no particular order):
- newspapers – which have more reporters and cover the news much more thoroughly.
- news wires – like the Associated Press.
- The police and fire department – a gold mine.
- tips from viewers.
- ideas from reporters.
- Twitter.
- huge news events – like 9/11.
- the daybook – a list of the day’s events, like press conferences, ceremonies, protests, etc. Some of these are:
- photo ops and staged events – particularly by leaders. The mayor or president would much rather you show him cutting a ribbon than have you talk about what he is not doing about poverty.
- press releases and video news releases (VNRs) – from government, businesses, politicians and lobbyists, mostly made by public relations firms.
The last is the worst. PR firms know that news operations work under a deadline, so they serve up ready-made news, not just the words but even the video and sometimes the “reporter”! What makes it bad is that the news will use those words and pictures without telling you where they came from, be it the State Department or a herbal remedy company or wherever. It is not regarded as plagiarism because the whole point is to get that content on the news.
Martin Luther King, Jr understood that television news needed pictures and that he needed a way to show racism. He did that by filling up a city’s jail with protesters and then keep on protesting, hoping the police would then do something desperate. “Film at 11.”
– Abagond, 2015.
Sources: Pew Research (2014), “How to Watch TV News” (2008) by Neil Postman and Steve Powers.
See also:
533
see this is the bias and pathology that your blog has become – news director
– to you means white male news director and it follows with white blonde female host ,oh and follow up with picture of blacks being abused and powerless.
oh well just checking in ,now I’ll check out.
LikeLike
Your post reminded me of this news story a few years back that shows just how manufactured and marketed the news really is. Its hilarious but makes you wonder if all news isn’t some kind of centrally planned propaganda.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUi7GJNg51C3jgmYTUwqoUXA&v=TM8L7bdwVaA )
LikeLike
Do any anti-racists use this technique today? Or are Americans now inured to what goes on?
LikeLike
@Mbeti
What exactly was wrong with abagond’s POV? News directors ARE primarily White and DO dictate what’s covered in the news. Often with a very skewed and unbalanced angle.
The news anchors on the local channels near me all look the same.. And most are blonde.. They do however let POC work the weekends.
You’ll need to expand on why you’re so bothered.
LikeLike
I don’t find those blonde women very attractive, to be honest….
LikeLike
@bygodsloveandgrace,
I cannot speak for Mbeti, for sure, but sometimes I see Abagond get bent on a certain angle, as though it is an expression of unrequited angst with a very pronounced subtext. The subtext is not always mentioned (eg, pastey “white” does not have to be mentioned if only photos of pastey white people are used), but it is very obvious.
It’s not a wrong point of view, but it is a point of view. For some longtime readers of this blog, it might get tiring.
I don’t find posts like this to be very empowering, esp. empowering to blacks and Mbeti was perhaps alluding to that (I can only speculate).
What affects me more is the tendency to portray society into a binary, bipolar model of white oppressors and black victims. So to me, it is not only not empowering to POC, it depicts society in terms that many might not be able to relate to. I am still OK with it as it helps to see it from his point of view (as white commenters help to paint a picture of other points of view).
This is one reason why, in addition to reading this blog, I am reading up more on Asian American and Native American history, society and culture (and maybe later more on Mexican American). There are other narratives out there.
LikeLike
“According to police, the tweet read, “TONIGHT WE PURGE! KILL ALL THE WHITE PPL IN THE TOWN OF LA PLATA.””
i guess they never heard of stormfront?
LikeLike
I think the point being made about news directors is not that they are a group of vicious White men following an orchestrated White agenda.
But the fact is that a news director is a position in society that wields a lot of undeclared and unelected power. To a large extent, they still shape the vision of the world that many people see and understand, beyond their own neighborhoods.
But when so many of these “gatekeepers” fall into the same age, the same gender, the same political party, the same economic class, and the same race, it means that THEIR particular view of the world gets propagated at the expense of others being neglected. The same would be true if 85% of all news directors were middle-aged Chinese female Republicans.
I think Abagond is arguing towards diversity of background, opinion and viewpoint, in a powerful and influential roll that daily shapes American society. But also, if that happened, news would ver likely become much more right-wing than it is today.
LikeLike
King,
“I think Abagond is arguing towards diversity of background, opinion and viewpoint, in a powerful and influential roll that daily shapes American society. But also, if that happened, news would ver likely become much more right-wing than it is today.”
Do you mean more left wing?
LikeLike
No^^ The majority of network news leans more left than right. If we insisted upon absolute viewpoint equality, network news would drift further to the right.
LikeLike
@ Mbeti
I put a picture of a White news director because that is what most of them are and it is important to know that. Too many people seem to think the news falls from the sky, that it is not something man-made and that its makers are almost always White. News is not a “window on the world”, it is a White lens on the world. It is also important to know how it can be subverted.
LikeLike
I watched Nightcrawler not too long ago. In the movie a statement was made that white people wanna see news about brown people committing crimes in white neighborhoods.
It’s a good movie about the news industry and the lengths they will go to for ratings.
LikeLike
King,
Is that from a study or just your impression?
LikeLike
Jefe,
“Do any anti-racists use this technique today? Or are Americans now inured to what goes on?”
The ppl who shot the Sandra bland, Walter Scott, and Eric garner videos. The videos moved a lot of people to take to the streets and the twitterverse, but doesn’t seem to move politicians to act. I think Americans are too comfortable with violence. The massacre of small children didn’t propel any action.
LikeLike
@Solesearch
Do you think the news industry would create and fabricate stories for ratings?
LikeLike
Solesearch, there are a raft of studies that I’ve seen that tend to indicate that. From my own observation, I’d say it’s probably true.They are certainly not liberal on every issue and tend to always be to the right of people who are the furthest to the left in their opinions. But I’d say that overall, excluding Fox News. most news tends to lean more to the left than to the right.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/Media-Bias-Is-Real-Finds-UCLA-6664
http://archive.mrc.org/specialreports/2004/sum/sum063004.asp
Of course, even if you link directly to 10 studies, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute absolute proof. And then, a lot has to do with how one defines left and right. But I’d say that the network news veers slightly to the left by my own observations, in most cases.
LikeLike
@ King
Maybe left in relation to the political centre in Washington, but that centre is itself right-wing. So, for example, there was no strong pushback from the “liberal” New York Times on invading Iraq. Hillary Clinton can vote for the Iraq War, the Patriot Act and push for the prison-industrial complex and still be considered “liberal”.
LikeLike
@King
News does not lean more left than right.
As Stephen Colbert once said, “Truth has a well known liberal bias.”
Sometimes just getting the truth spoken out loud is enough for people to say the news is biased towards liberals. But truth is truth and the opposite is, well, lies.
So if telling the truth makes one a liberal – what does that make conservatives but liars?
LikeLike
Yeah, the problem is that “Left” and “Right” tend to be defined only relative to each other, not to any set point. So Left is only left of where Right is positioned on that particular day. So saying that the news if more Left than Right is only saying that even when the “Liberals” are OK with invading Iraq, they still have many more reservations about doing it than do the “Conservatives” at the time.
It still follows that they are more Left than Right on the subject, but it just becomes clear that Left and Right are not set points of truth.
LikeLike
And the deeper you go, the more you see that most of the Left/Right is really just flip sides of the same coin—A kind of political good cop/bad cop.
LikeLike
@Solesearch
Yes, that is a very good point. Americans are quite inured to violence. Even watching video clips of it does not disrupt their sensibilities.
LikeLike
Why is the Washington Times FB page posting links to news articles here?
Anyhow, Waldorf, MD, where the man is from, is where I stayed visiting MD this past July, and where my brother lives. My niece lives in the area midway between Waldorf and La Plata. I traveled all around Charles County, MD this time. Waldorf is just over 50% black now. In communities where the black population has just surpassed the white population, there is heightened tension.
LikeLike
@Solesearch
I guess this sentence explains the sensationalism in that link about maryland above. If a white person tweeted, “Kill all Blacks”, he wouldn’t even make the news, much less get arrested.
LikeLike
He (or she) might just be suspended with pay…
(http://wblk.com/tags/teachers-bucket-list-to-kill-all-blacks/)
LikeLike
Sharinalr,
Idk, I don’t think they have to fabricate the stories. There are enough people making up stories for them to report on. They can usually twist the story to tell whatever narrative they want.
LikeLike
Abagond, I don’t know how often you watch TV. But there has been a huge influx of Black Americans in commercials for just about everything. New cars, eateries, etc etc.. I hope you are aware of this very fact some a-hole doesn’t use it against you in a later argument. I admit that I watch television way too much and you probably don’t.
LikeLike
@TeddyBearDaddy
Of what I watch on TV I have noticed this influx of blacks on commercials and so forth, but none of it seems to be for black enterprise. Only white owned companies trying to market to blacks.
These companies know and realize their biggest consumers. It is not a good thing for those blacks that are alseep because it is more of them relying on whites for things. ijs
LikeLike
I like this one, breaks down the news world really simply.
Oh god that phrase “if it bleeds it leads” – 😩
LikeLike
@jefe that was me, fb is kinda my thing? and yeah it was wierd that their ‘wp.com/posts’ came up straight from fb, it was ‘trending’ and i found it apropos, ie lom on some other thread, ok the wife is crowbarring me off the computer ciao
LikeLike
Another great post.
LikeLike
..I too enjoyed this post, it helped me to more easily “break down” the news reporting process-and also the motivation for why those in power do what they do. No one can please everyone all the time (nor should they try per se), but in general I always look forward to reading/learning from Abagond’s blog posts for both his engaging and personalized tone via his distinctive point-of-view. It is what drew me in years ago, and still keeps me engaged in this blog’s growth-so, while there may some who lean more towards nitpicking/whining about style/opinion(s) that does not match their own desired narrative, I would highly recommend that they create personal blogs, articles, etc. themselves in order to read what They deem acceptable/appropriate. In other words, everyone’s a critic..le sigh..
LikeLike
“This is why many people on the news seem to have more beauty than brains.” This will explain all those spray tanned “pagenty” looking peroxide air head blondes.
LikeLike
Those two broads in the picture are funny looking in my considerable estimation. It’s comical actually.
LikeLike
@Hernie & Mary, Agreed!
LikeLike
The news has become gruesome these days and they keep it on repeat and replay. How many times can they talk about a shooting or something going on in another part of the world like extremist terrorist beheadings. The movie Night Crawler is a perfect example of this post.
LikeLike