Brokaw: News as entertainment
Everyone knows that news has become entertainment. And as we know, the higher the ratings, the higher the advertising revenues. So it is with some interest that we read the comments of NBC’s Tom Brokaw from the transcript of a special appearance in the MSNBC.com Chat Room. Listen:
[I]f you go back and look at the so-called 'straight news' of the halcyon days of Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, Chet and David made their reputation not just based on the news that they reported but on their anecdotal asides, the show biz chemistry between the two of them, David’s little essays on life in Washington...Walter Cronkite was a paragon of the traditional news but one of his most popular features was Charles Kuralt on the Road doing little sidebar features about life in America almost like it was out of Reader’s Digest. So there’s always been a great mix of news and, if you will, the lighter side...
I often tell my friends in the newspaper business, "I dare you to try to survive by just printing the front page and the editorial page alone, without sports, obituaries, comics, weather and all the other parts of newspapers that draw readers to them."