The Case For Nightly Broadcast News – And What’s Wrong With Cable News

3) The crawl – Despised by many but still embraced by cable news, the crawl, also known as “the ticker” by those who want to give the crawl an undeserved air of respectability, was established after the September 11 attacks as a means to keep viewers up to date on the latest information while video of 9/11 poured over the screen. But what was once a useful tool during a crisis situation of national significance has turned into a crutch and a cop out for not covering stories on the air. Have you read what runs across the screen on those crawls? There’s a lot of news going on there but not a lot of it is being talked about or reported on the air. And a lot of those stories deserve being talked about or being reported on the air.

Broadcast nightly news has no crawl. It has a finite time to get only so many stories on the air. One would think they of all programs would need to have a crawl to subsidize their short airtime, but they don’t. If broadcast news, with its tight time restrictions, can get away without having a crawl, then the cable networks, which have a lot more time to cover a lot more stories and don’t, have no excuse for keeping their crawls. The fact that they do keep them, combined with the fact that the crawl tends to have more news in it than the average dayside news hour on cable news, suggests that something is terribly off kilter with cable news’ news judgment and programming.

“Twitter is still a mechanism that gets you the news you want but only if you are willing to jump through the hoops it presents in order to get it.”

I could keep going on cable news’ issues. A recyclable rundown, a bias against stories that don’t come with video, a disposition to ignore the rest of the world excluding certain select parts of the middle east (something that afflicts all three cable news channels though certainly not to the same degree), an over-reliance on graphical clutter and gee whiz technology in place of nuts and bolts journalism, a crack like dependency on talking head analysis in lieu of reporting stories…but you get the drift.

The whole promise and attraction of cable news is predicated on the premise that it’s not hamstrung in a nightly half hour period like broadcast nightly news is. It programs for most of the day and into the night (the days of the 24 hour news channel are long gone now…no channel is live 24 hours anymore). But it’s a promise that is increasingly going unfulfilled as the cable nets have cut down on what they cover and when they cover it – some definitely more than others. They’ve left the door open for TV news junkies to look elsewhere. But what about that other purported bane of broadcast nightly news’ existence: the internet?

For all the talk of the internet revolution and social media as a news tool that will doom the broadcast nightly newscasts there are some fundamental truths here which tend to get glossed over during the argument. Chief among these is a technological truth. The internet is not capable of delivering high quality video in real time for most of the world. The bandwidth isn’t there, nor will it be there for quite a while yet. A 320×240 or slightly larger streaming video is no substitute for NTSC over the air TV. Still, pictures can work as a substitute but only to a point. They only capture a frozen moment in time. If the news event has lots of moments, still images are a poor substitute. You only see TV news using stills when there’s no video available.

And social media? Twitter may get you headlines but, with a 140 character limit, Twitter is not suited to tell a story properly. There’s no video component and, as already discussed, bandwidth is still an issue for most of us in regards to hi res video. And Twitter is still a mechanism that gets you the news you want but only if you are willing to jump through the hoops it presents in order to get it. You either have to be connected to the right people who are good re-tweeters or search for the news you were looking for using hash tags or the search function. If you aren’t connected to the right people you’re SOL. Twitter has some inherent flaws which make it problematic as a news delivery tool. The problem with doing hash tags or searches is too much information comes in too fast during news events for you to possibly keep up, and frequently multiple hash tags are used to tweet a particular story because there is no agreed upon convention for hash tags. And you can’t read them all at the same time unless you have multiple windows or tabs open for every relevant hash tag. Nobody could possibly keep up with all that so you’re destined to miss stuff. Real time social media does have drawbacks if the sources are too many to keep track of.

The broadcast newscasts night in and night out deliver a more concise and more relevant news half hour for more people than most of the cable news networks do. They have a balanced news approach that doesn’t skew political. They frequently air stories you don’t see mentioned on cable news. And they don’t make you go out on a hunting party like you have to do on the internet. They deliver it to you, no assembly required.

Instead of getting ready to dance on the broadcast nightly newscast’s graves, maybe we should start praying for their continued survival.

Spud is an anonymous blogger for Inside Cable News where for five years he has tirelessly tried to hold the cable news channels accountable for anything and everything they do wrong while praising them for what they do right. In his spare time he sits locked up in a padded cell slowly losing his sanity and penning odd biographical footnotes like this one.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.