THE FOLKS AT MSNBC call it Alan Keyes Is Making Sense, but it’s pretty obvious they’d have come up with another title if he really was. You know, making sense. It’s not likely, for instance, that there will ever be a show called Christiane Amanpour Is Making Sense. This is packaging as desperate denial of reality, sort of like Mike Barnicle Is Telling the Truth, or Jim Lehrer Is Driving Viewers into a Frenzy with His Wild and Crazy Antics at the Anchor Desk.
The perennial Republican presidential candidate and former ambassador to the United Nations Social and Economic Council was given his very own talk show several weeks ago, every Monday through Thursday from 10 to 11 p.m. It’s hard to imagine what they were thinking at MSNBC. Do they really believe that Keyes, who expresses his esoteric right-wing views in cascading torrents of legalistic verbiage, could cut into the conservative-populist appeal of the Fox News Channel? Or is this just someone’s idea of a joke?
Keyes is dauntingly educated, well-read, articulate, affable, and as nutty as they come. In just the past week, he has provided a platform for Laura Schlessinger to express the view that birth control started America down the road to hell; assailed a California law aimed at preventing violence against gay and lesbian teenagers; and argued that we shouldn’t legalize torture — not because it’s bad, although it is (sort of), but because the president can order the use of thumb screws and truth serum all by himself.
"Does this make sense?" he asks in several canned pre-break bits during every show. No, Mr. Ambassador. Not even a little.
Alan Keyes Is Making Sense looks for all the world like one of those old Lyndon LaRouche infomercials (at least Keyes has a cameraman; LaRouche used to drift off-camera, his disembodied voice continuing to drone on while an empty set appeared on screen), or a mildly amusing public-access show on your local cable channel. Unfortunately, Making Sense is not an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is merely the worst example of how the 24-hour cable news channels are devolving.
For a brief, shining moment after September 11, it looked as though the cable news outlets — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — might escape talk-show hell and grow into the types of electronic news organizations we could take seriously. Walter Isaacson, a former Time magazine editor and the newish CNN head, sounded like he’d gotten religion last fall, saying he was abandoning plans to emphasize personalities and would reinvigorate his operation’s traditional hard-news edge. MSNBC dispatched Ashleigh Banfield to anchor a daily newscast from Central Asia, and though it was obvious that her bosses saw her youth and good looks as her principal qualifications, she has nevertheless turned in a solid, credible job. Fox News was the most fully committed to the talk-show format and thus had less flexibility. But at least O’Reilly, Colmes, Hannity, et al. had some real news to talk about.
It took only a few months for the new era of seriousness to fall apart. According to a recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the hard-news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks quickly gave way to bloviating talk-show guests opining about matters of which they knew little.
"On talk shows, journalists often seemed to luxuriate in sounding not like knowledgeable experts on TV stages, but like anyone else standing in a barroom," according to the report. As factual reporting gave way to opinion-mongering, the report added, the public’s opinion of the media fell steadily — from the 56 percent that thought the media were doing an "excellent" job in September to 30 percent in mid November.
Welcome to the post–post–September 11 world of cable news. And the race to the bottom may have only just begun.
COMPETITION IS GENERALLY a good thing, but the evidence is that it hasn’t been good at all for cable news. For 15 years or so CNN had the field to itself, building an international reputation as a reliable, if rough-edged, source for breaking news. Its breakthrough came during the Gulf War, when Peter Arnett kept reporting from Baghdad even as the bombs fells.
Starting in the mid ’90s, however, CNN had to contend with two upstarts. The Fox News Channel, part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, aimed to peel off conservatives who were alienated by what critics mocked as the "Clinton News Network." And MSNBC, a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News, pursued the young and hip. With the tiny audience for 24-hour television news split three ways, the entire genre began to sink into sex and celebrity — the O.J. trial, Princess Diana, Bill and Monica, JonBenét, and, finally, just before September 11, Gary and Chandra. Partly it was the times, of course; but with all those hours to fill, you’d have thought there would have been at least something set aside for substance. Trouble is, no one dared to break from the pack.
"The proliferation of news outlets, a development that brought a much-needed element of competition to the profession, now seems to have degenerated into a life-and-death matter of eat or be eaten," wrote Vaughn Ververs recently in HotlineScoop.com. "The drive to attract eyeballs has taken us straight down Madison Avenue, where controversy is king and sex sells, where the adage ‘any publicity is good publicity’ takes the place of ‘all the news that’s fit.’"
Alan Keyes and MSNBC aside, the cable news outlet that seems most thoroughly to have lost its way is CNN. Last month, for the first time, CNN fell behind Fox in average viewers (656,000 to 596,000, with MSNBC trailing badly at 296,000), even though CNN is available in nine million more homes than Fox. And the signs of panic are all around. (It’s not going to get any better. Last week, AOL Time Warner, CNN’s parent company, announced disappointing numbers. With Wall Street antsy, the pressure to cut costs and drive up profit margins is going to get even more intense.)
Last month, for instance, CNN hired veteran lightweight Connie Chung — last seen asking Gary Condit the same three questions over and over (Did you kill her? Did you have sex with her? Why won’t you answer?) — to take the 8–to–9 p.m. time slot vacated by Greta Van Susteren when she went to Fox News. Larry King, who has held down the nine-o’clock hour forever, was re-upped at a cost reportedly just shy of Katie Couric territory.
Thus the "hard news" network, rather than taking the opportunity to toughen up during the key prime-time hours of 8 to 10 p.m., is actually going to be even softer. Van Susteren is no newswoman — she’s a lawyer whose forte is blabbing about celebrity legal cases. But she’s smart and tough, two qualities that Chung distinctly lacks.
As for King, what, at this late date, is there left to say? Last Friday, with such grim news to report as the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the widening Enron scandal, Larry chitchatted with three Playboy models who’d be taking part in the trash-TV show Fear Factor during the Super Bowl. After being promised $500 apiece, two of them drank from the "blender of fear" (think Dan Aykroyd’s old Bass-O-Matic), a mixture purportedly composed of puréed pig rectums and brains, rooster testicles, and beef spleen.
There’s no identity crisis at Fox, as befits the number-one station. But that doesn’t mean all is well. Last fall, it hired the ridiculous Geraldo Rivera away from CNBC and sent him to Afghanistan, where he was immediately caught up in a controversy as to whether he did or didn’t visit a place where Americans had been killed. And Van Susteren will replace Paula Zahn, an experienced news anchor hired away by CNN to lead its new morning show. Granted, Fox head Roger Ailes didn’t want to lose Zahn. But it would have been nice if he had replaced her with another real journalist.
As for MSNBC, well, it’s got Alan Keyes.
