Former Dateline Reporter Explains Why TV News Sucks

Why is technology killing traditional news? In an article for MIT's Technology Review, former network newsman John Hockenberry spills the beans on the callousness and stupidity of producers at Dateline NBC, where he used to work.

Here's a conversation between Hockenberry and a producer, concerning the newsworthiness of video of prison guards choking to death a screaming, mentally ill prisoner:

At the conclusion of the screening, the senior producer shook his head as though the story had missed the mark widely. "These inmates aren't necessarily sympathetic to our audience," he said. The fact that they had been diagnosed with schizophrenia was unimportant. Worse, he said that as he watched the video of the dying inmate, it didn't seem as if anything was wrong.

"Except that the inmate died," I offered.

News has "completely abandoned the mission of reporting the news," Hockenberry says, in its search for an "emotional center."

Traditional news is doomed, not because print and TV are dead, but because the organizational bureaucracy that produces them is full of deadwood and inertia. The internet will only kill print and TV so that it may remake them in its own image.

"You Don't Understand Our Audience" [MIT via BoingBoing]