Faux's Holloway coverage is "an obsession bordering on the bizarre"

paineinthearse

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Mon Aug-08-05 08:14 AM
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Faux's Holloway coverage is "an obsession bordering on the bizarre"

Edited on Mon Aug-08-05 08:15 AM by paineinthearse

http://www.comcast.net/entertainment/index.jsp?cat=ENTERTAINMENT&fn=/2005/08/07/195986.html

Greta Van Susteren Cleans Up in Aruba
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer
Sun Aug 7, 9:13 PM

NEW YORK - Bringing a microphone and camera crew to the gates of an Aruba landfill this past week, Greta Van Susteren returned to the island that her nightly Fox News Channel program has figuratively called home recently. Van Susteren's "On the Record" has relentlessly followed the mysterious disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway of Alabama while on a graduation trip to Aruba in May. Critics find it an obsession bordering on the bizarre, twisting traditional notions of news judgment and becoming Exhibit A in the media's fascination with missing people _ as long as they happen to be young, white, female and pretty.

But while doing this, Van Susteren has been rewarded with her biggest audiences since making the switch from CNN three years ago. She averaged nearly 2.2 million viewers a night in July, up 58 percent from the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen Media Research. CNN's Aaron Brown used to put up a tough fight in the time slot; now Van Susteren routinely triples his audience. She narrowly missed 3 million on July 26, her biggest audience this year.

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Without being a regular, tuning into Van Susteren's show many nights is like opening up a mystery novel in the middle. It's all a little baffling to those who didn't buy the book. "I think she's registered to vote in Aruba now," joked NBC News reporter Josh Mankiewicz, who narrated a "Dateline NBC" report examining why television networks pay an inordinate amount of attention to missing white women. With war and terrorism in the news, critics wonder how one missing person case can so dominate a news program. Even on the night President Bush nominated John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court, "On the Record" spent far more time on Holloway. Her name came up 178 times during a computer search of "On the Record" transcripts from the past two months, only seven times for the same period on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" on MSNBC. The count was 434 times for Fox's three prime-time news shows; 50 for CNN's.

"Emotional pornography like the Natalee Holloway story is more alluring, just as a car crash is better TV than a news conference," said Matthew Felling of the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs. "But this media rubbernecking is partly to blame for the public's dissatisfaction in the media as a newsgathering enterprise." Two views on how to program a cable news network couldn't be displayed more starkly: Either use news judgment to put events into perspective, or give the people what they want, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

more.......

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Associated Press writer Peter Prengaman contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

http://www.foxnews.com

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EDITOR'S NOTE _ David Bauder can be reached at dbauder(at)ap.org