BILL BRIOUX posts an entertaining review/blow-by-blow of The National's first night with the new format. Like everything at the CBC, predictably, there are dinosaurs who are immediately off the blocks complaining about it -- one must always endure the "everything CBC ever does is wrong crowd..." but for my part, I found it entertaining and fast-paced. At the end of the broadcast I'd felt I'd learned a few things.
These are dire times (I mean, it's always dire times, but still ... ) for CBC News. They've gone through a painful reorganization and numbers have softened this fall.
Sadly, as I age I've taken to a new metric about news engagement -- the flutter factor. One of the reasons I often opt for Jon Stewart at the end of the day is that he makes me laugh. I love Craig Ferguson, too, but staying up to 12:30 to watch TV is a special occasion these days. Reading, yes...but if it's 12:30 on a school night and my kiester's in front of the TeeVee, there better be a guy throwing a ball or something magic going on.
Jon Stewart usually gets me past the flutter factor -- where mind starts to wander and your eyes get heavy. On a bad night I dump out at the guest if I don't find the book they're plugging interesting. Most of the time if it's a movie star, I'll leave unless it's someone who I know always does an odd or good interview, like Paul Rudd.
Already news purists like my friend Howard might be grinding their teeth. (Can't wait to read what he has to say about the new National; as is his fashion, I'm sure he's waiting til it settles in for a few days to post his thoughts.) The teeth grinding is undoubtedly keyed to the fact that I started talking news and defaulted to my reaction to an entertainment show.
But we all need to get over it. Walter Cronkite is dead, and this path of news as entertainment that Murrow warned us about in the early 60's is now a superhighway with Holiday Inns and Stuckey's and Indian Casinos every three miles. The entertainment value of TV news is important for a consumer like me not because I'm a brain-dead ninny who abhors context and can't sit still for a second and a half (though you could make a case for both) -- but because unlike 25 years ago, or even 10 or 15, I've already been consuming news all day.
I start with the paper in the morning. That gets anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes depending on how I feel and what's in it. (More on the Weekend with the NYTimes -- and lately the Globe's brought up its game too, so the weekend Mop & Pail takes longer to read.) Then I sit in front of a computer being fed news headlines in procrasto-worthy bite sizes.
I might learn of a news headline from Twitter or Facebook. If it's a Political story, I'll usually read about it on Macleans.ca (if it's Canadian) or Salon.Com (American) first.
So my news hole is really a picture hole -- I may have read about protestors in parliament -- but I haven't seen the footage. And I might not have followed the story enough to see how it played out over the day.
So if I'm going to tune in a news broadcast, I'm not looking for the voice of God...I'm looking for the goods on the stories I heard about, a couple of stories I might have overlooked, an analytical spin I didn't consider, and a presentation that beats the flutter factor.
Usually, Lloyd and Peter have had me unconscious by about story 3. Last night's National carried me through start to finish without a problem.
It's an interesting mental shift -- away from "we have to be the record because people are depending on us," to "people get their news from many sources... we have to be smartest one that puts it in context."
That's what Jon Stewart does, with a laugh -- and one of the reasons why, probably, there are those studies that show that his audience is generally better informed than the rest of the populace. There's more than enough room for the serious take on that -- especially if you're going to plop your news broadcast in the 10 o'clock hour where everyone else (well, except NBC) is opting for entertainment.
So I'll be going back to the New National. For the first time in a long time, it seems like there's a reason to.
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