Disaster Porn

On his HBO show last Friday, Bill Maher was talking about the horribly parasitic way in which the network news organizations cover catastrophes like the one in Japan. Maher labeled this coverage "disaster porn" because the goal of the news organizations is not to provide information, but rather to voyeuristically exploit the situation by showing as much miserable suffering as possible, followed by a few scenes of tearful reunions. And what single example did Maher use to support his thesis? He cited "Ann Curry holding a broken doll." Bam! He nailed it. What does it tell us that the only illustration of "disaster porn" Maher gave was from NBC? Obviously, Maher is familiar with Ann Curry and Nightly News. Actually, I'm surprised that Curry even went to Japan in the first place. She usually only leaves the country when she's following George Clooney somewhere.

In the March 13 New York Times Magazine, executive editor Bill Keller wrote a column about the aggregation of news in which he said, among other things, "Some once-serious news outlets give pride of place not to stories they think important but to stories that are 'trending' on Twitter--the 'American Idol'-ization of news." Decorum and propriety prevented Keller from specifically mentioning Nightly News, but clearly it was one of the organizations he was describing. It's obvious that the Nightly News producers spend much of their day scouring the "trending" lists on Twitter, Yahoo, Google and other sites as fodder for that evening's broadcast. How else to describe a news organization that ran stories on the "supermoon" for three consecutive nights--including Saturday's 1:45 story that managed to include gratuitous clips from three different films: "The Wolfman", "E.T." and "Breakfast at Tiffany's"?

What's gotten into Lester Holt recently? At the end of Saturday's broadcast, he bragged that, "We featured live reports from four continents tonight--just another day in the office for all of us worldwide at NBC News." So? Nightly News is supposed to be covering the news--wherever it occurs. That's their job. Why is Lester trying to take credit for doing what he's supposed to be doing? And on Sunday, near the end of the broadcast, we were shown a copy of the current issue of "Newsweek" with the cover story about all the horrible things happening around the world (tsunamis, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, revolutions) followed by the question, "What the (expletive) is next?" Lester's response: "We wish we could tell you, but we can tell you this--whatever it may be we'll be covering it on multiple fronts as we did again tonight." With all his bragging and boasting, Lester is beginning to sound a lot like...Brian Williams.

Speaking of Brian, can someone please buy him a thesaurus? After the first commercial break of Monday's broadcast he said, "Returning to our non-stop coverage of this ongoing disaster in Japan...." But the coverage of Japan didn't begin until minute 16. Does Brian understand what "non-stop" means? It means without stopping. If the Nightly News coverage of Japan was non-stop, it wouldn't have begun in the middle of the broadcast.

Where in the world is Richard Engel? As Brian introduced Engel's report from Tobruk, Libya on Monday, the graphic below Engel read "Tripoli". Fortunately, someone in the control room must have woken up, because at the end of the report, the graphic had been corrected to read "Tobruk". By the way, how long will it be before the Nightly News producers start augmenting their Libya coverage with clips from the 1967 movie "Tobruk" and the soon-to-be-released Keanu Reeves movie "Tripoli"?