Writing in The New Republic, Rob Walker (Slate’s “Moneybox” columnist) argues that the evening news is not so much politically biased as it is emotionally manipulative. Walker spent three weeks watching the network flagship news broadcasts (arrghh, it burns, it burrrrns…!) and in the end came away with these insights:

If the network news divisions think they are producing an evening broadcast so noble that it deserves to be defended from the corporate huns, they’re kidding themselves. And if the evening news isn’t dramatic enough for those corporate honchos, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s not just the much-noted increase in ‘soft’ news features that now eats up a large portion of each broadcast; even the hard news now comes with a hard sell in which emotional impact trumps intellectual content with appalling consistency. The evening anchors may still look and talk like paragons of wisdom and integrity right out of our nostalgia-clouded memory of The Good Old Days, but their broadcasts are something else. Or as they might put it, ‘Shameless hype. Trumped-up melodrama. It pretends. To be a public service. But just how dumb is your evening news?’

“Emotional impact trumps intellectual content with appalling consistency,” eh? Hmmm. Isn’t that the very definition of the social-liberal’s mindset (sans the evaluative “appalling,” I mean)?

Perhaps Bernie Goldberg’s “unintended liberal bias” thesis isn’t so far off-base, after all…?

An example of what passes for news these days?

[…] easily the best news feature I saw in my week of watching ABC was a tie-in to the release of the film Time Machine, based on the H.G. Wells novel. ABC Correspondent Robert Krulwich used the occasion to inform us that … time travel is possible! “‘his can be done?’ he asked, all agog. ‘How?’ The explanation came from a professor who managed to explain basic principles of physics as though they were breaking news: If you are moving fast enough, near the speed of light, for instance, you will travel ‘into the future.’ (Didn’t we learn this in high school?) To drive home the remedial science lesson, we were shown footage of 1970s experiments that confirmed Albert Einstein’s theories on this subject, followed by clips from the 1985 movie Back to the Future. Krulwich summed up: ‘So while it’s theoretically possible to leap into the future, unlike Michael J. Fox, we don’t have the vehicle, the fuel, or the know-how to do this — yet.’

There’s ‘innovative and bold’ news for you.

…And lest you think Walker is simply anti-ABC, here’s how he introduces Tom Brokaw of NBC:

Unlike Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw delivers the news standing, right out there in the open, in front of a floating video screen and a high-tech backdrop. It’s as if he’s speaking to us from a starship, or perhaps from the future itself. Energy is what NBC’s ‘Nightly News’ strives to deliver: Brokaw’s on-camera persona is spiked with pep. He doesn’t smile, of course, but he does emote.

…and the “CBS Evening News,” with Dan Rather:

[Rather] is 71 and is often described as the keeper of the tradition of fatherly gravitas that extends back to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. In fact, Rather is the most human of the Big Three’s Big Three: the one most likely to act like a hothead, spout a bizarre stream of homespun ad-libs, or shed tears on Letterman’s show. Far from being the last of the reserved, Olympian anchormen, his rise was an early harbinger of the let-it-all-out style of cable news. And his efforts to keep his passions in check for the sake of a mythical legacy — to speak for everyone while clinging to an accent that reminds us he is an actual guy who actually grew up somewhere, as opposed to having been concocted in some network laboratory — only serve to make him more fascinating.

So what did Walker learn from all this…?

[…] Basically that the network news, which defends itself against detractors by invoking the earnest sobriety of its broadcasts, contains as much hype and fake populism as any of its cable competitors. In fact, in some ways it’s actually worse. As distasteful as the cable shout fests can be, they generally assume that their viewers can handle a detailed discussion, conflicting views, and lengthy segments on a particular issue.

[…]The evening news […] treats its viewers like angry, gullible ignoramuses. And that’s particularly frustrating when you consider that the network news divisions are not threadbare operations: They employ packs of extremely highly paid journalists.

[…] Defenders of the evening news like to point out that even today, those broadcasts draw a cumulative audience that dwarfs that of the cable-news networks — some 25 million nightly viewers, compared with less than three million for CNN, FOX NEWS, and MSNBC combined. The usual rejoinder is that whatever its size, the network-news audience is in steady decline. That’s a fine point, but I have a different one, which is: What a waste! To the extent the evening news still draws us to a sort of national campfire, what it chooses to tell us once we’re gathered there is that those clueless senators were bickering again about something or other, and we have the footage to prove it. When I started my three-week project, I was interested in how the evening news might save itself. By the end, I was asking a different question: Why bother?

Why, indeed? After all, I can get my fill of manipulative populist pandering by reading my own website…! Right?