USA TODAY International Edition
CNN counters political news with human interest
Theory: Most viewers don’t care for politics
On Sunday, CNN continues its break from the formats it has developed in more than 30 years of 24/ 7 cable news delivery, launching two more long- form documentary series, its version of reality television.
While the shows were in development before the arrival of Jeff Zucker, CNN’s aggressive new boss, they fit perfectly into his guiding strategy and point- of- view about news: Not all drama is in Washington.
Washington, the Zucker view seems to be, is for dweebers and fetishists, whereas the full picture of news, the immediate and dramatic, the personal and tragic, the far- flung and exotic, speaks to the rest of us — or, in theory, ought to.
Morgan Spurlock, the documentarian who made Super Size
Me, a personal journey into the grossness of the fast- food industry, premieres Inside Man, wherein the ever- inquiring Spurlock is the everyman confronting a set of nagging, often heart- tugging, public issues.
Inside Man joins Ridley Scott’s Crimes of the Century on Sunday, and Parts Unknown, launched in April. The latter is Anthony Bourdain’s revival, in much cooler clothes, of one of television’s oldest staples: a travel show.
Zucker, whose long career has been in network television, is focusing on cable news’ central anomaly: While Americans as a whole are largely apathetic about politics, if not downright repelled, cable news — most specifically Fox News and MSNBC — is entirely focused on Washington.
And as Congress and the White House have become cable news’ passionate focus, they have continued to lose evermore influence. Finance, technology and media — all relegated topics in cable news — are, arguably, vastly more powerful in American life than politics. While personal issues such as health, food and relationships, have become the ne plus
ultra of Americans’ concerns — and big money media subjects — they get hardly a word on cable news.
In sum: Cable news isn’t the news. It’s a weirdly fixated view designed to speak to a few million agitated people. It’s news for the angry and addled.
This programming strategy has long confounded CNN. Its view of news has always been event- based; sudden, dramatic shifts and conflicts are its meat. War, crime, weather, mayhem. And, indeed, it has largely continued to dominate the sudden and dramatic. But in between the big events, the news audience drifts, leaving the hardcore right and left obsessives to Fox and MSNBC.
CNN’s own political coverage has seemed, next to the competition, hopelessly anemic and deflated.
Zucker’s is a network and even newspaper view, the most traditional view there is of news: human interest. He reached his apotheosis in morning television, which for many years Zucker dominated as the executive producer of the Today show.
Zucker’s proposition is to both enlarge the cable news narrative and to take it back. The drama in American life isn’t Congress, it’s … marijuana.
That’s the Spurlock opener. As a handlebar- mustachioed everyman in a T- shirt, Spurlock goes to work in a medical marijuana dispensary and, from behind the wheel of his car, narrates the story of America’s long, and likely soon- to- be lawful, love affair with pot — a story surely more resonant with more people than the sequestration.
After that, Spurlock becomes a fruit- picker among the illegal immigrants in Florida. Then he moves in with his own grandmother in a show about elder care — counterprogramming the impersonal nature of politics with the acutely personal.
There follows guns, bankruptcy, drought, unions.
Ridley Scott’s crime show is classic newspaper morgue cold case stuff — a regular feature the Sunday Daily News used to call the “Justice Story.” Bourdain, for his part, takes his skeptical and irascible nature on the
Who wants talk when you can have action?
Michael Wolff
road to the Congo, Peru, Libya, Tangier, Colombia and Myanmar ( also known as Burma) in search of adventure and meals.
This is old- fashioned, narrative journalism, a more relaxed 60 Minutes tone, a hipper version of magazine television.
In a sense, it is just the kind of programming that cable programs against.
Cable couldn’t afford expensive, on- location, production- heavy stuff that drew reliably large network audiences, so it invented cheap and blustering talking heads to profitably serve much smaller audiences.
But on- location productions, made with DSLR cameras and edited on the fly with Final Cut Pro, don’t cost very much anymore — you can hardly make cheaper shows.
What’s more, reality television has not only upended the costs of field production, but the look and feel of non- fiction television. Fox and MSNBC, with outraged heads behind a desk, seem like curious throwbacks.
Who wants talk when you can have action?
The Zucker ambition is large: To save CNN he has to change the nature of cable news. One way to do this is to change the tone of news in such a way that the other guy looks out of it. That’s what Fox did to CNN.
Certainly, the Spurlock show, in its emphasis on real people and real stories, with its kind of casual populism and actual empathy, starts the process of offering an alternative to, if not actually shaming, the snarling blowhards with their opportunistic manias.