“Broadcast News” Is Killing People in Ways It Doesn’t Even Realize
“So when you feel yourself just reading, stop! Start selling a little.”
This film is supposed to be forecasting the moral decay of broadcast news and how pretty people without Integrity are the ones telling the news over learned, jealous writers who sweat a lot on camera, and it is that in fairly brilliant fashion. That has surely been the case and one of our many problems. However, what stands out to me is the ethnocentric propaganda laced underneath all of it.
Albert Brooks is a hero of the newsroom for being on the frontlines with the “underdog” Contras, a US-backed, CIA-trained group formed to stop the Sandinistas from gaining power in Nicaragua / upsetting American corporate interests. He’s a hero for risking his life, for being there, for being in war, but there’s no consideration of the one-sidedness of the coverage.
Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks represent the dying breed of journalists who “Care,” and this film certainly doesn’t love that money and schmoozing is taking over the news.
YET this film glamorizes the hell out of making the news (hi, Aaron Sorkin). But “making the news” is the problem — it’s all about crafting the “story,” not the actual news when news is big business.
These ambitious reporters, even the Good (liberal) ones, don’t care about the people suffering in their stories. They are instruments for ratings (“Can you use that?”), for climbing the corporate ladder, with little consideration about their biases in the process. And those massive biases, the ones that place white American reporters above and separate from the stories they cover, those are the ones that loom large when I watch this whilst multiple American and Israeli-funded genocides are happening across the world.
“Big finish!
“I got chills.”
