A friend of mine who works for one of the Democrats running for president just e-mailed me asking for my thoughts on this evening's presidential debate in South Carolina. Although I've recorded it, I haven't watched it yet, so I don't have any real thoughts about it. My friend told me that his candidate, who has been a national politician for decades, got fifty percent less time than both Obama and Clinton. Perhaps that's because each of them need more time to explain their deeply flawed candidacies?
Brian Williams moderated the debate, and I'm reminded that he is one of the greatest news anchors in television history. And that's not a compliment.
From time to time you hear people say "the medium is the message" or talk about the "structural biases" of the media. The performance of Brian Williams and NBC News after the Virginia Tech shootings is the perfect illustration of the aforementioned concepts.
In a nutshell, NBC News glorified the shooter (I won't say his name, because he has already gotten enough publicity). They may have glorified him as a demon, but they glorified him nonetheless.
The reasons?
First, NBC News understands that cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic cause people to overestimate the relative importance of individual incidents. (Losing thirty-two college students is a tragedy, but it is also important to remember that every two weeks, on average, more college students commit suicide, and every day in America, more people are murdered.)
Second, television is a visual medium. The shooter provided NBC News both moving and still images, exactly what television needs. As a former communications director, I know that in order to get television coverage, you need to stage a scene for television cameras to film. I also know that when television cameras didn't show, if I hired a camera crew and delivered the video to television stations, they would frequently broadcast it. It's worse than kids and candy; television journalists demand video above all else. If the shooter had simply given them a letter, television networks would not have had the material they needed in order to devote nearly every news broadcast for a week to the shootings. They still would have sensationalized the story, but they wouldn't have had the material they needed to really go across the line. But instead, he gave them the material they needed to create a bigger story. (One assumes he did this because he wanted to become a permanent part of American and perhaps world history. Thanks to the media, he has.)
Third, NBC News is a business, a business in competition with other media outlets. Their exclusive access to the video and images of the shooter gave them an advantage over other media outlets, an advantage they exploited to the extreme. Even though though the only news value in the videos and images was to allow everybody in America to become armchair psychologists, it was impossible to avoid the images which had come into their possession. I intentionally avoided most of the coverage of Virginia Tech yet even when I loaded web sites like msn.com, images of the shooter dominated their pages. (Ironically, I was researching homicide statistics for an unrelated project.)
In retrospect, I'm sure that even Brian Williams would agree (in private) that the relentless hype surrounding the videos served no great purpose. The notion that having aired the video will prevent future murder sprees is almost laughable. The opposite is likely true. NBC and the rest of the media have demonstrated their willingness to lionize people who commit such crimes, giving the next potential shooter all the incentive he (or, less likely, she) needs. It's also sad that almost no one could name any of the thirty-two victims, but almost everybody can name the shooter.
But the larger point that I am making is that the news media's response was inevitable. Television relies on images and video. Moreover, television news is a competitive business. No rational television news network would ever withhold easily exploitable video like that which NBC received. If they did, their shareholders would sue them, and the shareholders would probably win.
Orthodox free marketers like to argue that markets produce optimal outcomes. Yet here is an example where the combination of the financial incentives of television news networks, their reliance on imagery, and human beings' cognitive biases produced a clearly unwelcome outcome. And it is equally clear that this outcome was inevitable.
Bill Maher, whose show I love, made a seemingly sensible point. He said that when drunk football fans or drunk baseball fans run onto the field in the middle of the game, their image is not broadcast on television because doing so would encourage more fans to run on the field. His point is a good one, but it is not directly analogous to the news media's handling of the Virginia Tech shooter.
Baseball and football broadcasts are carefully controlled productions. In a sense, a stadium is a massive televison studio, and anything that happens inside can only be legally broadcast with the consent of the MLB or NFL. There is no competition, nor should their be. Because their is no competition, they can implement policies such as turning cameras away from fans who storm the field.
But what if several different stations were allowed to use their own camera and production crews to film baseball and football games? Clearly, there would be a competitive pressure to show what's happening on the field when the game gets disrupted.
Now I'm not making the argument here that we should have a single, government run news network. I'm simply submitting for your consideration an example of how structural biases influence news coverage, and how intelligent (yet potentially deranged) people can manipulate those biases to their advantage. Being aware of these biases gives you a better chance of understanding what's actually happening in the world around you. And, as trite as it may sound, knowledge is power.
© Jed Lewison