Posted on: Sunday, January 19, 2003
Newsman dissects nonstop coverage
By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer
New York Times columnist Frank Rich made his reputation in the 1980s as an astute if controversial critic of the theater. He just may be, then, eminently qualified to comment on the American news media and the all-hours access to spectacle and drama they now provide.
Rich, the Times' chief drama critic from 1980 to 1993, has spent the last decade offering his insights on all aspects of culture and politics as an op-ed columnist and senior writer for the paper. He was recently named the Times' associate editor, and he'll begin a new column on arts, culture and society at the end of the month.
But first Rich is taking an overdue first visit to Hawai'i to lecture on what he has termed the "24/7 Media Culture." Rich's speech, which is open to the public, takes place at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the UH-Manoa Campus Center Ballroom.
Rich is a longtime friend of Paul Costello, the UH vice president for external affairs and university relations, who suggested the visit. His speech draws together ideas and observations Rich has touched on in his column over the past few years.
"The media landscape has changed enormously since the first Gulf War, with the rise of CNN and the emerging of competing 24-hour news stations," Rich said. "News has evolved into a sort of cultural forum. My question is, how did all this happen?"
Just as ABC's late-night coverage of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 led to the development of "Nightline" and a proliferation of news-based programming, so, too, Rich says, did CNN's round-the-clock coverage of the Gulf War establish the network as a leader in an evolving news industry, providing a model for a host of competing networks.
"We have MSNBC, Fox, Court TV, Bloomberg, CNBC," Rich says. "We have 24-hour, wall-to-wall coverage that swallows everything in its path."
Rich's interest in the emerging media culture has led to a couple of important questions about how news is now delivered and received.
"Is the news given in an impartial manner?" he asked. "How does it shape our discourse and history?"
The latter question covers familiar ground for Rich, who even as a theater critic looked for the intersections of culture, news and politics.
"I tried to look beyond the walls of the theater to see how a play might blend into the world outside," said Rich.
As a critic, Rich's undiluted honesty earned him the nickname the Butcher of Broadway from detractors. As a columnist, he's irked conservatives with his pointed criticism of the Bush administration. Yet most concede that Rich is as deft in examining complex social and political issues as he is in composing his fine prose.
On the morning Rich spoke with The Advertiser from his office in New York, news of missing bubonic-plague vials at Texas Tech (later disproved) was being intensely examined on each of the major cable news channels. Within a half-hour of the initial reports, CNN, Fox News and other networks had established live feeds from local stations and had assembled panels of experts to discuss how terrorists would likely use the samples and other extrapolatory issues.
"That's a good example," Rich said. "Part of the problem is that if everything is presented at the same hysterical pitch, it's hard to discern what is actually important. Is it something we really need to be concerned about? Is it news because there is no other news at the moment? I'm not sure how to evaluate that."
One intriguing development within the new media culture has been the rise of Fox News, a 24-hour news network that has raised eyebrows with its partisan approach.
"We're at a crossroads," Rich said. "Fox shows us that you can have a 24-hour news channel that is driven by opinion. It doesn't matter if that opinion is liberal or conservative. It's that there isn't a clear division like there is in most newspapers, where opinion is opinion and news is news."
Rich said the success of Fox has thrown CNN "into a state of confusion and uncertainty.
"CNN does a lot of good things, but they also do things now that are kind of amphibian — a little bit of CNN and a little bit of Fox," he said. "They seem to lack a clear identity."
Proof that the traditional lines between news and entertainment are becoming blurred may be found in where Americans go to get their news.
"It's not from newspapers or television or NPR. A fairly large population gets their news from the late-night monologue on Letterman or the Jon Stewart show. That and the migration of politicians and political candidates to entertainment shows us that the old categories are breaking down.
"I believe there will always be a market for hard news and authoritative reporting," Rich said. "But I definitely think it's a minority audience."
