Current Events: A New Look at the Nightly News
by Lindy Davies
The Henry George School has traditionally offered a "Current Events" class. The idea behind it, of course, is to demonstrate that once you've seen the cat, you start to see it everywhere: so much depends on the land question.
But, our courses have traditionally accomplished much more than their basic task of recruiting new Georgists. They have educated students about far more than the narrow field of economics. With that in mind, here is an exercise that you might like to try in "Current Events" classes. It involves taking an unusually close look at an episode of the network news.
Have you ever walked out onto a busy, mid-day, mid-town street and deliberately walked very slowly? Try it sometime -- it can be a mind-altering experience! Passionate pedestrians, intent on their intentions, go zipping past you in all directions -- while you, breathing more easily, suddenly start to see and hear many things that you'd been missing.
In a similar way, we can learn a great deal by taking a presentation of the mainstream news media and examining it with uncommon slowness and deliberation. You and your class will be amazed at what you find. It will immediately be clear to you that this is NOT how the Evening News was designed to be consumed!
Here's what you do:
Videotape the half-hour broadcast of a network "Evening News" show. It makes no difference which network, or what happens to be going on that day. However, in the interest of making your observations as universal as possible, it is best to use the national, network news broadcast. Before showing the video in class, you do a bit of preparation. Get yourself a stopwatch. Record the length and the topic of each segment -- and each commercial as well. You'll create a list that looks something like this:
1. New Pope named -- 3 min. 23 sec.
2. American Bishops bummed -- 2 min 4 sec.
Com: Heartbreak of psoriasis -- 30 sec.
Com: The new monster truck -- 30 sec.
Com: Get a new muffler -- 30 sec.
3. Baghdad swallowed up by the earth -- 3 min. 27 sec.
4. New prototype SUV runs on onions -- 2 min 23 sec.
Etc., Etc.Type up this list and hand it out to your students.
In class, you will watch the news show and examine how it is put together. If you look at it in this way -- examining the producer's decisions about how to put the show together, what segments segue into what segments, how the commercials fit into the picture -- I guarantee you will come up with surprising insights.
A few things to try:
Play through the segment of the day's top story a few times, until the class is thoroughly familiar with it. Have the students jot down factual questions that the segment raises but does not answer. Have them also take note of contradictions and non sequiturs. If experts are interviewed as part of the segment, record their names and credentials. (A bit of Internet searching on the names of those interviewees and their organizations might be an interesting follow-up!).
Keep the video running through some segments and a set of commercials. Let the next segment run for a minute of so. Then, stop the tape and ask the class to tell you the subject of the last two news segments they watched. Very few will be able to do it -- and many will be quite surprised to find out that they can't!
Divide the class in half. Have half the class listen to just the voice-over of one news segment, and take notes on what was said. Have the other half of the class watch the video of the same segment, without the sound, and take notes on what they saw. Then compare notes, and discuss the impressions created by the words vs. those created by the pictures. Were the pictures designed to create a different impression than that given by the words?
These are just a few for starters. Undoubtedly, the more your students plumb the subtleties of this innocent-looking little half-hour broadcast, the more questions they will ask, suggesting all the studies that you have time for.
The objective of this activity is to demonstrate for your students the ways in which the network news functions as entertainment -- and how this colors and compromises its role as a purveyor of factual information about current events.