ChezLark

I heard an interesting story on NPR the other morning as I was heading to work; it was an interview with Tom Bettag, senior executive producer of ABC’s Nightline. Bettag is leaving the show along with Ted Koppel, the longtime anchor. In the interview, which you can listen to by following the link to the story, Bettag says that one of the things that came to bother him and Koppel is the commercialization of TV news. Over time, he says, TV stations began tailoring the news more and more to appeal to the demographic segments most sought-after by advertisers, instead of, say, choosing to focus on those stories that seemed most important to the nation, in the judgement of the news crew.

I was initially surprised and discouraged by this, and then I remembered that all TV content exists only to get people to sit still long enough to have ads blared at them, and then I got depressed. In fact, this TV Week article has the strange sentence:

[...]Mr. Koppel, who understands that TV programming was created to induce people to watch commercials.

In the depths of my depression, I remembered my TiVo and everything was OK again.

But seriously, doesn’t it seem out of whack that the nature and texture of the news we receive should revolve first and foremost around what appeals, in an entertainment-sort-of-way, to the segments of the population that advertisers have the most success getting money out of? Let us all take a moment to consider supporting independant news sources, like National Public Radio.