Newsmongers

In the l976 film Network, Peter Finch, played an anchor named Howard Beale who famously implores his viewers to stick their heads out the window and scream, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Fat chance we're going to find any Howard Beales in today’s competitive news environment. How refreshing it would be to encounter an anchor who threatened to commit suicide on the air! Most of what we hear on the news is enough to drive audiences to suicide, if not drink. The elation accompanying the coverage of the disappearance of MH 370 on CNN is palpable as the networks ratings have benefited from the plane’s uncanny demise (“CNN’s Rating Surge Covering the Mystery of the Missing Airliner,” NYT, 3/17/14). Just a normal crash would not have made for what has become a television phenomenon. No this one has been a real doozy with no black boxes or debris in sight. The MH 370 phenomenon lies at the crossroads of aviation and television and if it continues will spurn a new academic major. The least that can be said is that the rate of increase of an anchor’s salary is directly proportional to the percentage of loose ends that remain from a catastrophe. Conversely, what is death to any network is the absence of bad news. God forbid the remains of the missing plane are ever found, the ratings will plummet. Human interest stories about boy scout troops saving endangered owls create such an obvious level of depression in broadcasters that many of them look they are already on one of the new generation of serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Television, like life, is cruel. And a period of peace and prosperity with no planes mysteriously disappearing is anathema to news executives and anchors both. Right now with the missing plane, the sunken South Korea ferry and the threat of civil war in the Ukraine, news people are having a feeding frenzy. Just look at the shit-faced grins on their faces as they report all that is wrong with the world.

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.

Nuclear Armageddon

Have you ever envisioned the equivalent of a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl in therapeutic terms? Let’s imagine that the interior core of a psychotherapist is like a great nuclear reactor filled with highly combustible materials deposited there by patients. Imagine the Catholic confessional as a bomb filled with conventional explosives. The difference between confession and psychoanalysis (the most intensive form of psychotherapy) is the difference between the kind of explosive device used by the allies in the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo and the kind of nuclear weapon tested at Bikini Atoll, a hydrogen bomb that creates a fusion explosion from heavy water. Now, let’s say that one of these fusion-level devices falls into the hands of someone like Kim Jong-il, the hermaphroditic despot of North Korea, which recently triggered another international crisis by sinking a South Korean vessel. That’s what it would be like if a psychoanalyst went off his rocker, symbolically starting a chain reaction that culminated with him spilling the beans. The fission and fusion reactions in atomic and hydrogen bombs, respectively, are ignited by detonators that are essentially conventional explosives. Similarly, the unleashing of the kind of incendiary material that lurks within the typical psychoanalyst would have to be facilitated by some sort of event that acted as a detonator. We are reminded of the television newscaster played by Peter Finch in Network, who urges his audience to go to their windows and scream out, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” Which therapeutic session, which bout of navel-gazing by the narcissistic patient, is going to finally throw the long-suffering analyst over the edge? What combination of private school and college rejections, of spousal abuse and infidelity, of financial instability, of thwarted ambitions and unfulfilled loves, of roads more or less traveled, will become the equivalent of putting what is supposed to be a deterrent into the hands of a rogue state? Let’s say Iran acquires enough nuclear fuel to create a bomb, or Osama bin Laden hatches an ingenious plot with the North Koreans, or let’s say the Opus Dei takes over the Vatican à la Dan Brown, or Orthodox Jews who don’t even believe Israel should exist decide to take the Middle East situation into their own hands, or let’s say gentle old Denmark or Sweden suddenly has a collective nervous breakdown and raids the papers of Nils Bohr the way children playing with matches start forest fires. Imagine what will happen when the cultivated person sitting behind you, asking gently if you have fallen asleep when you are supposed to be free-associating, suddenly says to himself, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”