Frank Rich (NYT): Happy Talk News Covers a War

[Dudley_DUright]

Up to a point, it's fun to howl at Will Ferrell's priceless portrayal of Ron Burgundy, the fictional local TV news star at the center of "Anchorman." The movie is set in the prehistoric era of the 1970's, when such infotainment inventions as Action News and Eyewitness News were still in their infancy. With his big ego, big lapels, big ties, big hair and pea-sized brain, Ron is every newsman who's ever told us "This is what's happening in your world tonight!" while remaining clueless about anything happening beyond his own teleprompter. Ron Burgundy has only one flaming passion: to end up in the big time of network news.

You have to laugh — until you realize that he and countless others like him have made just that leap in the three decades since. The local news revolution nailed in this movie — the dictum that the popularity of a news "personality" with the viewers, not the story, must always come first — has long since overrun most of both network and cable news. (The occasional holdout, typified by "Nightline," must often fight for its life or be subsidized at PBS.) No sooner do we rejoice at the demise of much of the 70's cultural detritus lampooned in "Anchorman," from polyester leisure suits to unembarrassed on-camera sexism, than we start wondering if TV news may be even more farcical now than it was then. But these days the farce isn't so funny. The worst damage committed by Ron Burgundy at the movie's mythical News Center 4 of San Diego is to overplay the pregnancy of a panda at the San Diego Zoo. Our news culture, and not just TV news, muffed the run-up to a war.

Watching Mr. Ferrell go on TV to promote "Anchorman" on the eve of its premiere, you had to notice just how plausibly his buffoonish, supposedly anachronistic, fictional persona fits into our "real" news. He turned up in his Burgundy blazer on the "Today" show the same morning The New York Post broke its front-page exclusive on John Kerry's choice of Dick Gephardt as his running mate. "This is an excellent journalism periodical," said Mr. Ferrell while thumbing through the offending tabloid before the crowd of "Today" show groupies in Rockefeller Center. Thus we watched a fictional anchorman mocking a fictional story from a real newspaper on a real news program — but was it so clear which was which? Only a week earlier, "Today" had committed its own equivalent of The Post's gaffe by failing to broadcast the live story of Saddam Hussein's court appearance in Baghdad. It stuck instead with an interview in which Robert Redford promoted a new movie in which he does not play Bob Woodward.

When Mr. Ferrell turned up on "The Daily Show" the next night, Jon Stewart ribbed him for not basing his characterization of Ron Burgundy on the fake anchorman Mr. Stewart himself plays on TV. But such is the vacuum now often left by the real news that Mr. Stewart's fake anchor is increasingly drafted to do the job of a real one. One recent instance occurred after Dick Cheney appeared on CNBC on June 17. The CNBC interviewer, Gloria Borger, asked the vice president about his public assertion that a connection between the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and Saddam Hussein's government was "pretty well confirmed." Not once but three times Mr. Cheney said that he "absolutely" had "never said" any such thing. But Ms. Borger had been right. And it was left to Mr. Stewart, not her actual TV news colleagues, to come to her defense by displaying the incontrovertible proof on "The Daily Show": a clip from "Meet the Press" in December 2001, in which the vice president flatly told Tim Russert "it's been pretty well confirmed" that Atta met with "a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/arts/18RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=

[KoKo]

1. WOW! What an excellent Lampoon of TV Media News! It's worth registering

to NYTimes under fake name and address to read this editorial by Rich.

It says it all!

BTW: I've never gotten spam from NYT's and am registered as "Jane Smith" at a different zipcode from my own. I uncheck the box for "do you want updates of news from NYT's" and in two years have never had a problem.