Chez Pazienza: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career:

As far as CNN (and to be fair, the mainstream TV press in general) believes, it still sits comfortably at the top of the food chain, unthreatened by any possibility of a major paradigm shift being brought to bear by a horde of little people with laptops and opinions. Although the big networks recognize the need to appeal to bloggers, they don’t fear them — and that means that they don’t respect them. Corporate-think dictates that the mainstream television press as a monstrous multi-headed hydra is the ultimate news authority and therefore is in possession of the one and only hotline to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid. Sure those bloggers are entertaining, but in the end they’re really just insects who either feed off the carcasses of news items vetted through various networks or, when they do break stories, want nothing more than to see themselves granted an audience by the kingmakers on television.

This, of course, is horseshit.

Two weeks ago, CNN fired Chez Pazienza for his blogging under his real name. The atrociously antiquated employee handbook states “any writing done for a ‘non-CNN outlet’ must be run through the network’s standards and practices department,” and CNN seems to have a history of exercising the rule without discretion. More than evidence of the company’s ridiculous bureaucracy, the story and ones like it illuminate the company’s unfortunate hypocrisy.

CNN’s willingness to fire someone like Jacki tells you everything you need to know about how backward the network’s thinking is when it comes to new media. It pays more lip-service to bloggers and their internet realm than any other mainstream media outlet, but in the end that’s really all it is — lip-service.

Sadly, the criticisms of conventional news media cannot be confined to its dealings with the internet and New Media. The problems are more fundamental, stemming from the overwhelming focus on profit margins that permeates every major corporation. It would be impossible to underestimate the effect this has on network news reporting. When news is seen as a necessary evil — barely profitable but wanted by all the target demographics — strict objectivity is thrown out the window. What stories are reported, and how they are reported, instantly changes.

During my last couple of years as a television news producer, I watched the networks try to recover from a six year failure to bring truth to power (the political party in power being irrelevant incidentally; the job of the press is to maintain an adversarial relationship with the government at all times) and what’s worse, to pretend that they had a backbone all along. I watched my bosses literally stand in the middle of the newsroom and ask, “What can we do to not lead with Iraq?” — the reason being that Iraq, although an important story, wasn’t always a surefire ratings draw. I was asked to complete self-evaluations which pressed me to describe the ways in which I’d “increased shareholder value.” (For the record, if you’re a rank-and-file member of a newsroom, you should never under any circumstances even hear the word “shareholders,” let alone be reminded that you’re beholden to them.) I watched the media in general do anything within reason to scare the hell out of the American public — to convince people that they were about to be infected by the bird flu, poisoned by the food supply, or eaten by sharks. I marveled at our elevation of the death of Anna Nicole Smith to near-mythic status and our willingness to let the airwaves be taken hostage by every permutation of opportunistic degenerate from a crying judge to a Hollywood hanger-on with an emo haircut. I watched qualified, passionate people worked nearly to death while mindless talking heads were coddled. I listened to Lou Dobbs play the loud-mouthed fascist demagogue, Nancy Grace fake ratings-baiting indignation, and Glenn Beck essentially do nightly stand-up — and that’s not even taking into account the 24/7 Vaudeville act over at Fox News. I watched The Daily Show laugh not at our mistakes but at our intentional absurdity.

Pazienza’s lengthy diatribe is largely depressing, as any bitterly honest look at network news is likely to be. But it ends on an uplifting note. As more and more households gain access to the internet, conventional news media will become increasingly irrelevant. Until the fateful day, though, when we can cast off the entrenched Old Guard, people need to constantly call them on their shit.

Awhile back I was watching a great documentary on the birth of the punk scene, it closed with former Black Flag frontman and current TV host Henry Rollins saying these words: “All it takes is one person to stand up and say ‘fuck this.’”

I truly hope so, because I’m finally doing just that.

And I should’ve done it a long time ago.

Amen.

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