Zimmerman, Television and Social Media

Note: The following was a presentation to the Cleveland Media Association, Cleveland, TN, on August 2, 2013. I'm grateful to the CMA for the opportunity to speak. Special thanks to Dr. Joel Kailing and Allen Mincey.

Our topic today is, generally speaking, Televised Criminal Trials, but more specifically the State of Florida vs George Zimmerman. With respect to the topic, I’d like to cover three points, though with the disclaimer that these points may not be the droids you were looking for. I want to address first of all the state of television news, especially cable television; then I want to talk about the lingering controversy over TV’s handling of the Zimmerman trial (with passing reference to a few other trials); and I’d like to conclude with comments on the role of social media, which may very well be the emerging Fifth Estate in this country and abroad. And it’s just possible that the Zimmerman trial may be a watershed event for social media influence in the USA.

So. Point #1 is a categorical statement that will set the tone for the rest of what I have to say. Here’s the statement—it’s kinda big: Television news (especially cable TV news--but possibly excluding local TV news) is not really news. What I mean to say is that TV news is Infotainment with a dominant corporate agenda to bring the largest possible audience to paying advertisers. This last distinction will become important here in a minute.

The Medal of Fear

I think Stephen Colbert recently and very aptly demonstrated what TV news has become. In 2010’s Washington, DC "Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear," Colbert awarded several awards and medals. And he awarded a Medal of Fear, not to Anderson Cooper the reporter, but to Anderson Cooper’s tight fitting black t-shirt that he wore while reporting live on various natural disasters. And I think Colbert's tongue-in-cheek recognition pointed out one of the more disturbing trends in 24-hr news coverage, that of reporters who are trying to position themselves as characters in an unfolding human drama, a drama in which they aren’t so much uncovering news as they are trying to tap into gut-wrenching human emotion on the scene.

So for FOX News, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, HLN: When you put “news” in the title of your broadcast, one generally assumes there will be news. But ounce for ounce there’s about as much real news on those networks as there is Coca in Coca Cola. Anyone try to catch actual news on television during primetime? HLN used to have it, but now they have Nancy Grace. But when you watch any of the others during daytime hours, you'll see they have resorted to a news "digest" at the top of the hour followed by news-related “discussion” that features far more partisan policy makers than experts. Why? Because uninformed people yelling at each other makes for better TV. If you want qualified, boring experts, go to PBS, NPR or better yet, to Stewart and Colbert on the Comedy Channel. But be careful. There may just be a strong correlation between expertise and liberal bias. 

I don’t want to belabor the point. I could parse for you the comparative news content on TV news, and even at the best of times and under the best of circumstances, TV news coverage is very weak in comparison to print and even some radio. (Check this article for more specifics.). But let’s jump to the Zimmerman case.

So, with regard to the Zimmerman trial, was the TV news coverage terrible? Yes, emphatically so. Was it agenda driven? Yes, You betcha! Was that agenda political?  No, it was not.

We need to pop some big myths about TV news and bias. First of all, there no longer is an animal called “the mainstream media,” if it ever existed. It’s time to exorcize that demon from our minds. It may have existed when three networks, plus PBS, and two news services—UPI and AP—dominated the news industry in company with a handful of urban newspapers. In those days, the respectful conservative opposition was also represented by highly educated, gentlemanly wordsmiths, masters of taste and tact like William F. Buckley, William Safire and James J Kilpatrick, men who could string together a pithy sentence without the help of a ghost-writer. There were standards in those days and the bar was high if you wanted to be part of the national dialog. “The glory has departed,” one might say. Advertising had its place, because someone had to pay for the airtime, but news directors and anchors, who made middle-class incomes, worked their tails off to gather news and present it to the masses. That was the era in which there might have been something we could call "mainstream media."

Now, however, news media is highly fragmented in message on one hand but amazingly unified by entirely corporate agendas on the other. So what is the first great goal of any corporation? Profitability. What makes for profitability in the world of televised news? Ratings. And how do you get ratings? You tell a gripping story. How do you tell a gripping story? Why do we like “CSI”? Why do we watch “House”? Why do we TIVO “Downton Abbey” so we can be sure we have a box of tissues handy? What’s so great about “Duck Dynasty” and “Storage Wars”? 

They have tragedy and triumph, colorful personalities and suspense and, above all, they have CONFLICT. The average American feeds on drama, and nothing makes drama more poignant than conflict.

So let's take a look at the Zimmerman trial coverage. A host of conservative bloggers and mavens (who have evolved into desperately unoriginal carbon copies of one another) have eviscerated CNN, HLN and other TV news carriers for depicting the principle characters in starkly contrasting terms. It’s obvious the Obama agenda has got to be at the bottom of all of this! Race should never have been an issue here, it was invented by the media! Mainstream liberal media bias, clear as day, people!

The Skittles

But take another look at it. Did the TV news coverage play the race card? Undeniably, they did. Did they paint a simplistic contrasting picture of an innocent teen who just wanted some Skittles and a brooding vigilante rent-a-cop? Yes, many of them did. Did they leak each little bit of hearsay evidence without much in the way of fact checking? Absolutely. They did all this and intensified the hype with hour upon hour of analysis by people going at each other like sports analysts on ESPN. Was all this sloppy sensationalism about ideology? Not really. People don’t really like ideology. People have pretty advanced crap-meters these days and it's pretty hard to sell ideology to us. But guess what? We are every one of us suckers for drama. Will Casey Anthony cry? Will Jodi Arias show her true colors? Will the jury convict? "If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit!" These networks are all looking for a Holy Grail, but there’s nothing Holy about it: they are all in search of that one viral moment that may propel them into ratings heaven.

Speaking of ratings, they go a long way to explaining what was really going on with this case. We start with Headline News. Headline News has recently become a surrogate Court TV. Second to last in the cable news race, a whisker ahead of CNBC and behind even the Weather Channel, their market analysts have discovered a valuable niche. HLN alone has run all the last big trials (Casey Anthony, Conrad Murray and Jodi Arias) gavel to gavel and in the closing days of those trials, their ratings shot up as much as 100%. So guess what? The closer we got to a verdict in the Zimmerman case, other cable networks ditched their regular programming for the trial as well, lining up color commentators to give us the play by play followed by hours of instant replay analysis. Did their ratings go up? Indeed they did. Mission accomplished.

But wait a minute! Who didn’t run the trial? FOX News. Why didn’t FOX run the trial? For ideological reasons? Nah. FOX didn’t run the trial because FOX didn’t need to run the trial. Get this: Even though CNN claims to be “the most watched cable news network,” every one of FOX’s mainstay programs, from "FOX & Friends" to "Bill O’Reilly," absolutely demolishes all the other cable news offerings combined. That’s right. Anderson Cooper’s black t-shirt runs a distant third behind FOX's and MSNBC’s programming for the same time slot.

So if I’m an executive at one of the non-FOX networks and I have a decent shot at grabbing a bigger chunk of the overall cable audience, you bet I’m going to use what’s available to do just that. Do I privilege aspects of this story that heighten the conflict, that get people emotionally involved enough to stay with my network as the drama unfolds? Do I conveniently neglect to run details that might make the story more mirky and less formulaic? Of course I do. 

This is where I repeat one of my common mantras—in the end all we have to do is follow the money.

But wait, there’s more! In this case, and certainly going forward, the story is a bit more complicated. Something else is going on here that has added a whole new dimension to TV news coverage. And that something is the exploding role of social media.

In the last couple of years, social media have played a part in altering the landscape of human events. Twitter, Facebook and other social media apps have become conduits not merely for social change but also for actual revolution—both peaceful and violent—helping to topple governments and shape the course of national policy decisions.

In the Zimmerman case, social media changed the shape of this story and played unwittingly into the corporate values of TV news. Shortly after the shooting in Sanford took place, the apparently glaring absence of an arrest prompted a social media uprising that led to actual protest marches. These protest marches had a direct impact on the eventual arrest and charging of George Zimmerman.

As media critic Phil Cooke noted, by July 4^th 2013, 200 homicides had occurred in Chicago; 78% of the victims were African American. What did those cases lack? Public outrage. In Florida, social media activism forced the issue and made the Zimmerman trial necessary. And during the trial, social media commentary, much of which had very little basis in fact, fueled the hype surrounding the trial itself. For a 24-hr news network that needs chum to keep the news tank churning from dawn to dawn, the social media craze was like blood in the water. Out of hundreds of possible cases nationwide, one solitary tragedy gets this kind of attention. Why? Because we, the people, decided it should. It’s the ultimate democratization of the news.

Social media have also become a quick way to find out what the audience cares about. Hardly a major story is touted on any TV network today without pausing to consult the social media oracle. Tweets and FB posts now form the basis of entire stories—Remember Manti Te’o (see my earlier blog post)? In the Zimmerman case, both sides of this trial resorted to social media in unprecedented fashion, from creating websites to proliferating tweets and posts, that took their cases directly to the public. One juror was dismissed because of a Facebook post. The Seminole County spokesperson was asked by media to abandon less reliable email updates in favor of Twitter, which she did—and there was much rejoicing. Finally, thousands of tweets about the trial were aggregated, dissected, weighed, measured and assessed by media outlets as a tool for ascertaining the public’s sentiments and thereby coloring the content for the next news broadcast.

One last word about social media in all this: There is a very dark side. A lot of very hateful material has been and is being circulated about this case, and I don’t like to say it, but many otherwise respectable and decent people have tapped into some of the most hateful stuff without stopping to check the reliability of the information. And that’s unfortunate.

Is there a lesson to be learned from all of this? I hope so. Even in an era awash with undisciplined, uninformed and unscrupulous manipulation of information, there are still ways to find the truth, and we owe it to ourselves and to our friends not to allow ourselves to be carried away by all the hype and drama. Ultimately we may be looking at a contemporary form of mob rule, though in this case it would be the electronic mob. I just don’t see how that has a happy ending, do you?