The Absence of "Why?"

I found this fantastic short documentary by Adam Curtis, aired on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe on the BBC, on “The Rise and Fall of the TV Journalist.”  It was so poignant that, as a former TV reporter, it scared the daylights out of me:

Curtis makes a fantastic point about how TV journalists “had been patronizing and elitist when they had lectured us about corruption in high places.  Instead, all stories in the future should reflect our experience, and attempts to explain why things happened were abandoned.”

There’s a reason for this: TV is not built to tell us why things happened – that’s boring (I don’t agree with that sentiment, but it’s true).  It’s built to show us what happened, in all its visually spectacular glory.

That brings me to my next point – that it wasn’t the fall of the Berlin Wall that changed TV journalism, so much as it was 9/11.  On that day, news organizations scrambled to get video shot by passers-by, looking for that stunning footage of a second plane slicing through the South Tower.  It was so morbid, and we couldn’t take our eyes off of it.  But that day was the beginning of the end of TV journalism, because the networks, in the scramble to get the most incredible, Stallone-action-movie-esque video, cut out the middle man.  Plus, the story was so big and obvious, there really was little “reporting” to be done.  The planes crashed, the towers fell, and that was about it.  No one cared much about finding out why al Qaeda did what it did – we just wanted to get them for doing it and blast the rest.  Journalism, in the sense of explaining why something happened, suffered.

So the question is, how can we get back to doing our job – finding out and explaining why things happen? How do we answer those all-important questions – how and why – in a way that grabs and holds eyeballs?  Those are the questions we’re answering in this program.