Three decades ago, an obscure skiing accident sparked a chain of events that ultimately changed our entire culture--a change that in some ways endangers our very freedoms. Today, the internet may be the only thing that can protect our liberties, but only if we guard it from the E-Commerce that supports it &endash; and from itself.

All the News That's Fit to Sell

by Del Miller

December, 7 1999

Up until the late 1960s, the world of American television could be described in two words: NBC and CBS. The National Broadcasting Corporation and the Columbia Broadcasting System dominated every facet of TV programming, most importantly in the field of television journalism, where the two broadcasting giants cast a giant, journalistic shadow over what Americans saw and heard. The American Broadcasting Corporation ran an ignominious third, hardly amounting to noise on the signal of the nation's television industry.

But then an enterprising ABC Sports executive, named Roone Arledge, launched a new kind of program. "The Wide World of Sports" was a collage of sporting events that many Americans had never seen on television. Track and field, figure skating, the pentathlon for cryin' out loud, and of course, the winter Olympics. Soon, off-the-wall sporting events were popular all over America and so too was ABC Sports.

The Agony of Defeat

There are, no doubt, many reasons for the ascendancy of esoteric sports at that particular point in American culture and sociologists could ponder the question well into the night. But I attribute the phenomenon to the marvelous, two-part film clip that Arledge chose to run every week as the introduction to The Wide World of Sports. In the first part, a fanfare sounded against scenes of jubilant, cheering athletes, as the announcer intoned in a dramatic voice-over, "The thrill of victory...."

The scene then switched to the second part, as an unnamed ski-jumper barreled down the ramp at upwards of eighty miles per hour. As he approached the bottom of the jump - the critical point where the slope reversed and diverted the human projectile's momentum toward the sky and a subsequent two-hundred foot leap of faith - the skier apparently, though understandably to my way of thinking, lost confidence and decided to exit the event, stage right.

With full, undiminished velocity, he power-dived off the ramp, directly and most forcefully into the packed snow beside the jump. In a horrifying display of good physics gone bad, he bounced several feet in the air, his linear kinetic energy converted into a crazy, loose-limbed, high speed cartwheel, which brutally pounded him repeatedly to the ground in a series of bone-crushing faceplants. Skis, goggles and snow flew in all directions and his body flopped about as if his shorts were caught in the lug nuts of a speeding semi's wheel. The Demons of Speed and Gravity then gathered all the remaining energy in the poor fellow's juddering fall and slammed him into the hard ground for one last, shattering blow that rebounded him high into the air in a spectacular arc of remarkable, suspense building hang-time. In that tiny fraction of a second, his body assumed the peculiar, disconnected, stricken pose of a stunned monkey, followed by a high speed, full-frontal, frighteningly painful savaging by a decidedly immovable wooden fence. The announcer finished his line in a somber voice, "... and the agony of defeat."

In living rooms all across America, time stood still. Regardless of whatever else was going on, someone would cry, "Hush! Look at this!" Beers would stall out mid-swill, as all eyes followed the skier's hellish pummeling and, as he slammed unmercifully into the wall, everyone would grit their teeth and groan in sympathetic pain. Then someone would ask, "He died, didn't he?" This ritual was replayed every Saturday afternoon, in every home in the country for twenty years and "The Agony of Defeat" became an icon of American life.

The Wide World of Sports became very, very popular.

Owing to his great success with The Wide World of Sports, ABC gave Arledge all the resources he needed to turn Monday Night Football into the sports fan's holy sacrament. He brought in the dry, tell-it-like-it-is Howard Cosell, along with Dandy Don Meredith and Cool Frank Gifford to host what became one of the longest running series ever to be televised. With Monday Night Football, and the help of that well bludgeoned skier, Roone Arledge turned sports from an athletic event into a celebrity driven box office spectacular and forever changed the face of sports broadcasting. Sports was no longer sports, it was now big-time entertainment.

He also turned ABC Sports into the number one sports channel in the country, an achievement not unnoticed by the brass at ABC. While the sports division was doing well, the same could not be said for the rest of ABC, in particular the news department, which was taking a beating from the likes of Walter Cronkite at CBS and Huntley and Brinkley at NBC that made "the agony of defeat" look like a trip to grandma's house. So ABC promoted Roone Arledge to Vice-President of ABC News and Sports.

The New Journalism

The process of sorting through the threads of history, to find those seemingly unremarkable events that somehow turned out to change the world, is full of surprises. But for sheer, pervasive impact, few such events match that day when corporate America decreed that news was entertainment. From that day forth, the quality of news was increasingly judged by viewer ratings and hence by the advertising revenues that depended on them. The days of broadcast news as the highest art of professional journalism were over. Within a very short time, the function of news organizations all over the world changed from informing and explaining the events around us, into slick marketing vehicles with the primary aim of maximizing stockholder return.

True, pumping up the headlines to sell newspapers and suppressing news that is embarrassing to its advertisers is a time honored tradition going back to the "yellow journalism" of William Randolph Hearst and beyond. But the current state of affairs in the commercial news media is of entirely higher order because it has become institutionalized and rationalized in the wider culture as an accepted business practice. The organizations that bring us the news are corporations, and since the performance of corporations is measured by financial metrics, we therefore make the reasonable assumption that the product of journalism can likewise be judged by popularity or profitability.

The corporations that bring us the news are just that, corporations. They have CEOs, boards of directors, annual statements and stockholders whose monetary interests are always the first priority of any stock company. News companies satisfy their obligations to stockholders with advertising revenues which are based on circulation numbers or viewer ratings in the market. Therefore it is necessary that the product (the news) contribute to the welfare of the client (the advertisers) based on the client's most important numbers (ratings, i.e., the popularity of the program).

Which would all be very fine unless you notice what's missing from this equation: The integrity of journalism and the right of the people to know. Notice also, that there are no bad guys here, just a lot of people doing their job the best that they can within the system. No conspiracy, no dishonesty, just people making a living. Who could argue with that?

What this means is that the people who ultimately decide what we read in the papers or see on the television are not professional journalists and certainly not anyone sworn to uphold the sanctity of the press. Rather the decisions as to what will be news is ultimately made, in an indirect yet persuasive way, by advertising executives of General Motors or Proctor & Gamble. This arrangement bespeaks a conflict of interest that is terribly profound to a free society, where access to the truth is essential. If a major news outlet should choose to bury the story that one of it's major advertiser's products tends to catch fire in a deadly fashion during otherwise normal situations (this happened) it may be a sound business decision, but what happened to the truth?

The political implications of this practice are even more significant. If the news media's polls indicate that the majority favors a given presidential candidate, then standard marketing principles dictate favorable stories about him and less favorable stories about his opponent. This is not a hypothetical situation, it is commonplace.

The problem is made radically worse by the massive media mergers that combine entertainment and news into an amorphous product of questionable veracity. Disney/ABC, News Corp/Fox, Time-Warner, Viacom/Paramount/MTV/CBS etc., are essentially entertainment companies that also happen to control significant portions of the news market. We find increasingly that the news formats tend to the brief, catchy headline; that the big news story is a survey of what people think about the issue rather than the issue itself - a subject generally too complex too deal with in the strobe light of MTV style presentation.

The result is a blurring of what is news and what isn't and with it comes an increasing sense that we do not hear or see the whole story. When news becomes so abbreviated one cannot help but doubt the message and when the content becomes thin enough the level of disbelief exceeds the news content itself, resulting in the contemporary phenomenon of negative information. With no real information reaching the people, how can we call this a free press? What this all means is that the free press is not so free.

Enter the Internet:

Just as the credibility of commercial news sources is becoming downright surreal, along comes a new media - the internet. This new media is blessed with bidirectional lines of communication allowing information to flow in all directions and with it, the yoke that commercial news organizations have on the public awareness is diluted--diminished proportionally to the active involvement of the participants.

The World Wide Web is more than a technology, it is a social organism with a life of its own and its lifeblood is the unencumbered voice of all who use it. It is not a media in the sense that television and newspapers are, it is a global community that represents the first, truly free press in the history of mankind. Despite the ongoing attempts to commercialize it, the Web's very nature makes it an engine for democracy that is ours for the choosing and, as we march into the new millennium, it may be the single greatest weapon in the arsenal of freedom.

The point of all of this is that we need to realize the greater importance of the Web is not its potential for commerce, but rather as a foil against the commercialization of the truth. When governments attempt to regulate its content, when corporations try to turn it's purpose into merely another entertainment venue, we stand to lose our last best chance for a truly free and democratic world.

This is not hyperbole--how we manage the growth of the web has a far greater influence on the future than any of us can easily imagine. Three decades ago, an unfortunate skier's horrendous fall began a string of consequences that led to the equating of a free press with entertainment and, ultimately, to the corruption of an institution upon which all of our liberty depend. If we allow the global voice of the Web to become just another entertainment vehicle or simply a revenue source for corporations and government we endanger our very freedom.

Copyright 1999, Del Miller. All rights reserved.

Del also writes the "Difference Engine" column at www.macopinion.com

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Friday, 10-Feb-2012 08:18:39 EST