Nightly News: Dumb
It has likely been more than a year since I had last watched national evening news. That streak came to an end today when I watched NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. I watched just long enough to see a single news story, and with that story I knew that the rest of the program was not worth watching. Admittedly, my disapproval of the coverage is nuanced, so I’ll start with an exercise.
Imagine you are a reporter tasked with bringing information to the masses. You have recently been made aware that British Airlines is flying empty passenger planes from London to New York. Upon a rudimentary investigation, entirely based on publicly available information, you determine that British Airlines is doing this because the London airport has “use it or lose it” rules for time slots. That is to say: the airlines purchase a block of time to fly their planes, and if they don’t fly them, they lose their investment. These slots are very expensive.
Armed with this knowledge, how will you choose to pursue this story? Will you call and seek comment from British Airways officials? Talk to the airports in London? Seek comment from airline workers? Who will you deem credible to discuss the issue?
Furthermore, how will you attempt to justify this as news to the American people? Will you argue that millions of dollars are being wasted by foreign-based airports with the costs passed on to American consumers? Will you investigate the logic in what appears to be a silly regulation?
Having asked yourself these questions you might be fascinated by the task ahead of you. Before you run off and start reporting, let me disappoint you upfront by giving you a synopsis of how they actually chose to handle this story (because this was aired some 10 minutes ago, allow me to paraphrase):
In the day and age of global warming and environmental concerns, environmentalists have learned that British Airways is flying planes across country with no passengers. Each plane puts 400 tons of carbon into the atmosphere - equivalent to 16 SUVs driving 15,000 mi. over the course of a whole year. This guy from Greenpeace had this to say [cut to interview]: ‘blah blah global warming blah environment blah blah save the whales.’ British Airways said the flights would have flown with or without passengers anyway, so no excess emissions were put into the environment.
Was this where the story was meant to go? Does anybody consider Greenpeace a credible authority on this issue? The planes would have flown one way or the other, not to mention they could only cite a half-dozen planes having ever flown empty. Consider that in context: there are over 87,000 flights just in the U.S. in a single day.
I’m of the growing impression that we don’t need ‘conservative’ news or ‘liberal’ news. We need not-stupid news. I would settle for libertarian news.
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