Who Gets to Be Human on the Evening News?

Abstract

In August 2005, America's three major TV news networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS — refused to air a thirty-second advertisement that called them out for shirking their journalistic duty. Prepared by an activist group trying to bring attention to the violence in the Darfur region of Sudan, the ad uses clips from offending newscasts and admonishes the networks for devoting far more time to covering the so-called runaway bride, the Michael Jackson trial, and Tom Cruise's love life than the bloodshed in Sudan. A scolding, stentorian voice-over declares, “You can't stop a genocide if you don't know about it.” And it urges, “Genocide is news. Tell the media to be a witness” (BeAWitness.org). The networks didn't offer any excuses when they rejected the shaming ad, but a month earlier, in the industry magazine Editor and Publisher, newspaper top brass around the country defended their own neglect of the story: John Yearwood, the world editor of the Miami Herald, explained, “If we don't cover the Michael Jacksons, that will be our demise. That is what the public wants. But we ought to make the commitment to also give Darfur or Rwanda attention if we can.” Knight Ridder's foreign editor, Steve Butler, offered an only slightly more dignified justification. “We have been keeping our Iraq coverage going and that is a more important story,” he told Editor and Publisher. “It has US soldiers there, people are very interested in it, and it lends itself better to breaking news” (qtd. in Strupp).