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Newsiness?
Stephen Colbert appeared on the O’Reilly Factor. Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on the Colbert Report. Both happened last night, a few hours apart, in what was billed as a ‘Smackdown’ — the ultimate television news commentator (O’Reilly) finally meeting face to face with the ultimate fictional news commentator (O’Reilly again, just kidding - Colbert), each a caricature of the other.
I didn’t watch. I was late getting home from work and missed O’Reilly’s show and chose not to stay up late enough to watch Colbert. I suppose I could have Tivo’d it, but it didn’t seem all that important to me. Truth be told, while I will watch both Fox and Comedy Central pretty regularly (I am a media junkie, remember, the more information I can consume the better), I get most of my news from the other news networks and I align myself more with the Jon Stewart/Daily Show gang when it comes to that kind of entertainment.
Fortunately, the news and entertainment media did the watching for me. A quick Google News search this morning revealed 158 articles about the two swapping appearances. In truth, there were far fewer unique articles written, but the Google News search shows up all the AP placements and similar (lots of reprinting of this one). No matter, the coverage is pretty much what you would expect. The two shows, it sounds like, didn’t quite live up to the billing (though I am sure that super-fans of either O’Reilly or Colbert would say differently). The funniest moment, as I read it, came during O’Reilly’s appearance on Colbert’s show, described here by Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times.
On Comedy Central, Mr. Colbert suggested that Mr. O’Reilly was a bit of a brawler. Mr. O’Reilly demurred with a joke. “I’m effete,” he protested. “This is all an act.”
Mr. Colbert leaned forward and said in a deep, dramatic voice, “If you’re an act, then what am I?”
My question is this: Is this news, or is it entertainment? In my print edition of the New York Times, Ms. Stanley’s TV Watch Column appeared on page A16 - in the National News section along side articles about breaking up gang violence in Los Angeles, a nasty and very public row between justices on the Michigan Supreme Court and a host of other serious issues. In the online version of the Times, the article appears in the Arts section. It is not uncommmon for the TV Watch column to appear in the main news section — when Ms. Stanley writes about how the State of the Union or some similar political announcement comes across on the tube it gets lumped in with the other national news coverage. Is the same as coverage of the State of the Union? After all, nearly all of the non-New York Times coverage seems to have come from entertainment writers like Ms. Stanley — Jake Coyle, the AP’s entertainment reporter, Peter Johnson, who writes the Media Mix column of USA Today, etc. I haven’t seen where any of those columns appear in the print versions of their respective papers.There is one article by the staff of Editor & Publisher, a group that covers the news media exclusively, but only one so far.
Two thoughts: First, the reason this is getting so much coverage, I think, is because the media wants to shed some of its guilt about how much of an entertainment enterprise it has become and how far away from true journalism it has stayed. They have decided to place the blame on the over-sized ego of Bill O’Reilly and the over-sized fictional ego of Stephen Colbert. Think about it — both Colbert and O’Reilly are public figures who report on happenings from around the world on their respective shows, and what they say impacts how the rest of the world views those issues. That makes them part of the news industry. Still, while many people argue that O’Reilly presents hard news and Colbert presents a fictional version of it, in reality, both O’Reilly and Colbert do the same thing – deliver the news to their audience with an extra dose of their own personality added for effect. Some would argue that the only reason Colbert’s audience gets the news is because of how he presents it - and the same argument could be made about O’Reilly. That makes them entertainers. Entertainers aren’t bad, but can they present the news? Journalists aren’t evil either, but are they entertaining?
Second, I actually believe that the New York Times’ coverage of this event – and more to the point, where they placed it in the print edition – says a lot about the future of media, in a good way. Alessandra Stanley is a journalist and did in fact report on the meeting of these two television personalities as a news event. Just because this particular news event is born out of an entertainment focus doesn’t make it any less news — or at least that is no longer for someone like the New York Times to decide. Her contribution to the Times is just as important as that of Adam Nagourney, and in many ways equally influential when it comes to how the public reads and responds to it. The placing of the TV Watch column in the main section of the paper is an acknowledgement by the Times that the lines between different types of news content are now permanently blurred — the audience doesn’t see a difference, so the paper shouldn’t either. I only wish the New York Times had put the article in the national news section online as well.
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