According to the promo's and CNN's own website, The Situation Room, "assembles top CNN correspondents, analysts, contributors and guests for complete, up-to-the minute coverage of the day's events." Hosted by Wolf Blitzer, and modeled on the concept of the White House Situation Room, the program will attempt to combine traditional reporting methods with what they are describing vaguely as "the newest innovative online resources." The rationale for this is to make the entire process of newsgathering more transparent in addition to "placing the latest news and information at the viewers' fingertips."

I'm sure this type of show will feed the news junkie in each of us. We can get a serious fix of uncut news everyday from 3 to 6 PM (EST). But is it good journalism, or even a good idea?

Already the lines are very blurred between news and commentary. Last week when an Air France jet skidded off the runway and burst into flames in Toronto, news organizations (CNN included) practically wet themselves the news cycle with stories of the "miracle" of flight 358. It was felt by the seasoned journalists that the survival of all aboard was somehow a miracle.

This was the quick encapsulation of what Canada's Transport Minister Jean Lapierre said after learning everyone on board Air France flight 358 from Paris had survived. "It's nothing short of a miracle." He said it, it must be true, let's run with it.

When you allow for a natural pause, putting some distance between the event and commentary, you quickly see how much of a non-miracle this turns out to have been. [base "]There is this myth out there that says if you[base ']re involved in a catastrophic aircraft accident the odds are extremely low. That[base ']s inaccurate. The odds are extremely high,[per thou] said Mark Rosenker, the acting chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

Does anyone remember the summer of the shark attacks?

In 2001, there was the case of eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast in Pensacola, Florida. Jessie was swimming with his family in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida in early July, when a bull shark more than two metres in length bit into his thigh and his arm. Passers-by resuscitated Jessie and a medical helicopter transported him to the nearest hospital.

This was followed by a New Yorker who hit the headlines when he lost his leg in a shark attack in the Bahamas. Then a shark bit a surfer's ankle in the same waters where Jessie had been attacked. In mid-August 2001, Florida state officials said they had spotted hundreds of sharks in the Gulf of Mexico.

In September 2001, there was a fatal shark attack. A 10-year-old boy's left leg was badly attacked at Virginia Beach in Virginia, and he died in hospital the following day. Two days later, a 28-year-old man died in a shark attack in Avon, North Carolina, and his 23-year-old girlfriend had her foot torn by the shark.

On 4 September 2001, Time magazine published a special report headlined 'The summer of the shark'. In fact, if it had not been for 9|11 it is highly likely the stories would have continued unabated though the end of October and into the next summer season. Sadly, the reality of that summer was that there were fewer shark attacks than average and further that shark attacks had been on the decline for some time. The direct attention of the media, and the way news producers react to the competition of the ever increasing market, had conspired to create an illusion and this illusion fed on itself.

This is my problem with the entire concept of showing viewers "the latest news and information." People , being what we are, come hard-wired to attempt to draw conclusions abut what they see and hear. News organizations, because of their focus on 'bad' news, tend to amplify society's general level of anxiety. To try to display raw footage without even the benefit of a contextual back-grounder seems a little foolhardy.

We should also keep in mind that the White House Situation Room is designed to allow a _few_ people who are good at providing contextual information an opportunity to take in and digest information for the purpose of providing the President a contextual briefing of what a given crisis means to the National Security of the United States. CNN viewers are for the most part going to remain unaffected (perhaps even only voyeurs of) by what will certainly be a ceaseless window into an instantaneous superficial view of the crisis d'hour.

Hopefully, people will vote with their feet and go find other sources of information from 3PM to 6PM (EST).
7:07:30 PM    comment []