And That's the Way It (Was)

Abstract

This medium [radio] – and until the rise of video and VCR its successor, television – though essentially centered on individual and family, created its own public sphere. For the first time in history people unknown to each other who met knew what each had in all probability heard (or, later, seen) the night before: the big game, the favorite comedy show, Winston Churchill's speech, the contents of the news bulletin. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes , 1996 He's a working journalist. I’m impressed. Anyone who can reach into the data swarm and pick out what's newsworthy has my respect. Ryan Bingham, in Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air, 2001 Television is dead. Elihu Katz, “And Deliver Us From Segmentation,” 1996 On February 11, 1993, as the media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century was already showing signs of strain, CBS Evening News closed with a story on the increasing number of docudramas – made-for-television movies based on events and people in the news – being aired on prime-time television. The segment focused on the plans of all three major networks to air docudramas about Amy Fisher, a young woman who was convicted for shooting the wife of her sleazy lover Joey Buttafuoco. In response to the segment, Dan Rather ended his broadcast by facing the camera and, referring to the news broadcast he had anchored for more than a decade, saying, “ This is real.” Of course, the notion that what is real or true is contestable and socially constructed is as old as the idea of the modern fact itself (Poovey ). What is telling about Rather's impromptu comment is less its naivete than that he felt the need to make it at all, a clear indication that the norms, practices, and institutions that for more than half a century had served to distinguish news from entertainment were collapsing. Were the comment made during the height of the Age of Broadcast News, it would have taken on a very different meaning, much like Walter Cronkite's signature closing of CBS Evening News : “And that's the way it is.” During a period of regime stability, this nightly mantra, made by the most trusted man in America (according to polls of the time), signaled the acceptance by both viewers and journalists that the news media provided a useful and accurate picture of political reality. By 1993, however, Rather's unrehearsed comment, tinged with exasperation (and coupled with the fact that CBS Evening News chose to treat the docudrama battle as newsworthy at all, in the process providing free advertising for its own network's version of the Amy Fisher story), connoted little more than a desperate attempt to maintain the distinction between news and entertainment. And it is a comment that, were a news anchor to even consider making today, could be received only as ironic or satirical.