Anchored to Their Looks

Michelle Kosinski

CNN’s Michelle Kosinski is an uncommonly good looking correspondent in an arena where photogenic appearance means a lot. Lonnie Quinn who does the weather for WCBS in New York is also an example of a reporter with exceptional looks; in his case he’s almost a character out of a book like Bonfire of the Vanities, someone who one imagines being there to record a hurricane creating havoc—in a novel. But as any good looking person will tell you looks, like wealth, can be a bane as well as a boon. It's often hard to get past the good looks of a person. If you were a producer, how would you judge whether you wanted to choose Michelle Kosinski as your White House correspondent, if you couldn’t get your eyes off of those gorgeous glossed lips? On the other side of the fence, the good looking person who has so many opportunities, due to his or her appearance, can’t choose what he or she wants in work or love. Do I want to be an anchor for CNN, which is a serious news station, if I can be paid more saying less on Fox. And how do you make a choice in love? Most of us don’t face these kinds of problems, but really good looking people should be pitied for the possibilities that are constantly placed before them. No sooner do you fall in love, then another petitioner comes along who is not only more brilliant and better looking than the present candidate for your affections, but also a better source, providing you happen to be in the news business. But is it really true that good looking reporters regularly scoop their less attractive counterparts? And who ever said that life is fair?

Conjuring Magnum Force

The reports of beheadings and other atrocities on the part of ISIS bring out the Dirty Harry in all of us. The outrageousness of the crime is directly proportional to the level of revenge— that was the formula for the immensely popular Clint Eastwood movies. Remember Harry Callahan’s famous lines, “But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya punk?” You may find yourself intoning them when you see one of those videos that you’ve had to go to the Fox News site to see (since CNN refuses to show them). Increased feelings of helplessness fueled by the Charlie Hebdo affair and the shootings in Denmark fuel further fantasies. How about releasing the most violent and unrepentant prisoners in maximum security prisons (providing they aren’t Jihadists) and setting them down on the border between Syria and Turkey with full license to wreak havoc. Or better yet, if we need boots on the ground, which is what we are constantly told is the only real way to defeat ISIS, how about a million man strong robot army, which is impervious to suicide bombers? Every robot would have it’s minder, safe and secure behind a control consul at say Strategic Air Command in Nebraska. Let the enemy fire all they want, these bullet and bomb proof robots won't be stopped. Only what happens when it turns out the robots have minds of their own and their artificial intelligences turned out to be real?

CNN vs Fox and the Execution Tapes

photo of eyeglasses from Auschwitz (German Federal Archives)

What is the difference between showing films of the allies liberation of concentration camps with their piles of corpses, body parts, teeth, glasses and other artifacts and the decision of Fox News to show a still of the burning Jordanian pilot on TV and the whole video on its web site, (“Jordan executes 2 prisoners after ISIS video shows pilot being burned alive,”Fox News, 2/4/15). CNN has taken a holier than thou attitude about the showing of such violent videos, feeling that they are propaganda for ISIS(“Why does CNN refuse to show ISIS video?” CNN, 2/3/15). But propaganda about what? How could the sight of masked ISIS soldiers looking on while their captor is burned alive in a cage be looked at as positive propaganda? Films of animal cruelty have yet to attain such heights of brutality. Granted in the l9th hangings were forms of public entertainment. But there are still no shortage of those who deny the reality of the Holocaust and though it’s hard to believe, there are going to be apologists for ISIS somewhere who will only be chastened by the reality of horrifying videos that the organization itself produces. For Heidegger one of the means by which a human being can attain an authentic existence is through the awareness of death. The CNN anchor Carol Costello made the point that the network will show a plane crash, but not show pictures of a human being actually dying. Sure these are tough calls since there are instances where the broadcasting of such images is an invasion of privacy that takes away from a sacrosanct moment in human life. Media outlets like CNN and the Times gain credibility by creating an aura of equanimity that eschews sensationalism. But is there any point in hiding searing images of torture, mass murder and genocide? Are we sparing the victims and the families, or the perpetrators of these atrocities?

INN, The ISIL News Network

flog of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

There has been much talk about how media savvy ISIL is and how part of the executions involves getting their victims to add to the propaganda blitz. The very notion of media and social networking is warm and cuddly and makes you think of the kind of political advertisements that fill the airways during a presidential campaign. Hyperbole rules the roost and all kinds of absurd claims are made, but it’s really business as usual. While chopping off heads isolates ISIL from the family of man, their expertise at conveying their message and the success with which they do it, what McLuhan meant when he famously said “the medium is the message," creates a business as usual type feeling. ISIL even sounds like a network  It’s always shocking how anything can be packaged to appear normative. (Remember Leni Riefenstahl’s paean to Naziism, Triumph of the Will?) Is it really far-flung to think that ISIL will someday provide competition for Al Jazeera?  The Al Jazeera Media Network is purportedly funded by the Thani family family of Qatar and there have been rumors that ISIL is being funded by Salafi and Wahabi money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar both. Providing news and weather  on cable is in itself a way of creating a certain kind of validity. For instance Fox News specializes in tendentious and often tabloid reportage, but it radiates an air of legitimacy simply because it’s a well- positioned and slickly produced offering on cable channels. Who is to say that someday in the not too distant future, ISIL won’t attempt to become just another cable news show, sugar coating the situation of their soon to be beheaded hostages by using them as anchor and weathermen, who read from a script in which they report the temperature in Riyadh,  domestic abuse scandals among NFL players and their own obituaries, before being executed.

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

There is an epiphanic moment in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues when the news icon Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) comes up with the winning idea which will allow the graveyard shift to which he has been exiled to triumph over his rival’s primetime ratings. “Why do we have to tell them what they need to hear?” he asks. “Why can’t we tell them what they want to hear.” And what they want are stories which involve animals, car chases and strip clubs (the “fifty greatest vaginas” is one of the hot pieces of journalism on the show). Thus a story about the car chase that ensues when the wife of a celebrity cuts off his penis creates a frenzy in the newsroom. And it’s a car chase that ends up upstaging Ron’s estranged wife, Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), an anchor at the rival WBC, as she interviews Yasir Arafat. Ron has a penchant for burgundy leisure suits by the way. Ha, ha. Outrage about the mediocrity or idiocy of the movie which includes lines like “Who in the hell is Julius Caesar, I don’t follow the NBA,” (a line that’s so silly it’s actually funny) only conscripts such conscientious objectors into the movie’s wake of comic destruction. Anchorman 2 is thus criticism proof. Either lay down arms and laugh like an asshole or become an asshole for daring to make judgment calls about the films idiotic conceits. But what is truly unsettling about Anchorman 2 is that its absurdist news philosophy (which has a distinct America First slant) together with Ron’s cry for  “more graphics,” makes it a blueprint not for CNN, the all news network it purportedly parodies (the company is called GNN, Global News Network), but Fox News. The scene at the end of the movie where Ron gets up and walks off camera is no Network, but there are echoes of Peter Finch’s famous speech. The founder of the all news network is an Australian air line mogul who talks about synergy when killing a story that’s critical of his company and he also bears resemblances to both Ted Turner and Richard Branson and take your pick of the network executives who are the prototype for the TV executive played by Harrison Ford. But at the end of the day watching Anchorman 2 is just like watching Fox News. In fact, Fox News has on occasion outdone Anchorman 2 in both its reporting style and choice of stories. At one point Ron asks his wife about their six year old son, “are you sure he’s not a midget with a learning disorder?” And what you begin to realize is that Ron’s outlandish locutions create a new epistemology of news gathering. Given the right audience, you can say literally anything about reality and call it news. Anchorman 2 does for TV journalism what Animal House did for higher education.