WSJ's Daniel Henninger with another indictment of cable news melodrama:
- What in the name of Edward R. Murrow is going on here? Once upon a time, TV people wished upon a star that some day there would be stations devoted entirely to news so they could show just what real journalists they were. That day arrived, and anyone with the stamina to "stay with us" in recent days began to feel like the soul in the famous Bob Dylan song: "You know something's happening but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?"
An expert: "You don't want to be hit with a bullet like this." An anchor: "We have an e-mail from Jef." A question: "Is there any sense that parents are upset that the police withheld this information?"
We saw David Kaczynski, who turned in his homicidal brother, discuss "What if you have serious suspicions about someone in your own family?" As he soberly answered this question we've all wrestled with, a grim trailer of victim photos passed across the screen, followed by footage of crazy Ted himself in chains.
TV is the most voracious medium ever invented. Every minute, every hour, unto Sisyphean eternity all-news on cable has to pump out something, and what it pumps is an ever-open hydrant of talk by anchors, reporters and "experts." I even saw Col. David Hackworth; he does Iraq, he does Afghanistan, he does local shootings. And while the talk runs, we watched footage of events that were live or were once live. Milling squads of "authorities," acres of yellow tape, choppers in the sky, last week's crime scenes and this week's, that window with the bullet hole.
There are graphics. MSNBC did a piece on .223 bullets--sensuously photographing a circle of beautifully lit, copper-colored bullets while a voice described the "kinetic energy" and "havoc" of this "extremely powerful round." When CNN, the "Sniper on the Loose" channel, took a commercial breath, it played an ominous drum--boom, boom, boom, boom.
All day it ran on, flowing across the screen and dumping out into the bottomless catch basins known as our brains. Nothing else I know of creates such a discontinuous mix, other than dreams and night sweats. (Not movies, whose every frame has been thought about for effect and purpose.)
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