There is a six-letter word that television news cannot tolerate, even though it’s something that’s routinely used in the production of news programs. It forms a continuing thread in every news show on the air and is a fundamental part of the training of every onscreen journalist, and yet television reels in horror at the very mention of its name. Broadcasters would rather take a pay cut than admit their complicity in the growth of this dreadful contamination of the objective business of reporting. But this summer the beast came to haunt TV news in a series of neurotic outbursts that made headlines across the nation. The name of the beast is, of course, acting.
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No sooner had ABC News apologized, groveled, and generally prostrated itself before public opinion (i.e., other journalists) than the outbreak of Acting began to spread to other news shows. This summer, one episode of NBC’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow offered a mixture of documentary and drama that included a tough, liberal account of the My Lai massacre, an impressively passionate use of drama investigating the plight of the severely handicapped, and gory reconstructions of violent crime that would not have looked out of place on a rabid Fox TV show. Where necessary, it reconstructed events using actors and employed cheesy electronic superimposition to place its anchors in fictionalized sets–thus confusing the relation between past and present and conflating drama and documentary images. More recently, a pseudo-controversy erupted over allegations that CBS News had faked documentary footage of the war in Afghanistan. But the story was broken by the New York Post, a newspaper owned not coincidentally by Rupert Murdoch, who also happens to own the Fox Network. CBS, which refuted the charges, does use dramatic reenactment in its new current-affairs show Saturday Night With Connie Chung. (Chung’s $1.6 million contract is again a clear indication that performing ability is already built into the economics and aesthetics of TV news.)
The media response to these transgressive trends was saturated with hypocrisy. And the response of TV critics was almost as laughable as the reactions of TV journalists themselves. Across the USA, television writers turned away temporarily from the arduous business of regurgitating press releases to pontificate on the betrayal of journalistic principle. Then the number crunchers joined in. “Americans Confused by Pseudo-News Shows on TV” announced the San Francisco Chronicle, picking up a Los Angeles Times story based on a Times Mirror survey. This questionable conclusion was drawn from empirical data suggesting that viewers (quite correctly) refuse to believe that “news” and “entertainment” programs are distinct entities. So where’s the confusion? Obviously it’s in the heads of media critics and highly interested commentators who are unable to comprehend the fact that the public no longer buys their self-serving professional rhetoric.
This fetishistic attitude toward the visual is rarely challenged (such is the power of “professionalism”), but in South Africa Now (Sundays at 10:30 AM on Channel 11) it is negotiated with great skill and with an intrepid sense of how to exploit TV news conventions even as the show smashes the frame of objectivity. Mixing news events, political commentary, and cultural coverage relating to southern Africa, this program is wily in its radicalism. The male presenters wear suits and ties. Interview set pieces are cut with visual wallpaper for illustration (and to hide the edits) in classic TV news style. The newsroom is a simple pastiche of network news presentation sets from the days before computer technology spliced TV journalism with the mise-en-scene of Star Wars. A superimposed inset almost parodies the use of photos and graphics in traditional TV news.
