Pranksters hijack 'banal' TV news
Richard Luscombe in Miami
Sunday July 3, 2005
The Observer
LINK to article
A campaign of 'hacktivism' aimed at improving the quality of local television news has left reporters fearing on-air ambushes from a giant tiger or a cheese-flinging martial arts expert. Shock tactics have been employed by a New York-based group that says it has had enough of TV stations feeding viewers an insipid diet of minor car accidents, petty crime and house fires in which nobody gets hurt.
In an attempt to get 'real news' back on the agenda, the Newsbreakers group has hijacked live reports in several states with an array of characters including Cheese Ninja, an alcoholic religious correspondent called Dizzy Monk and the Reverend Utah Snakewater, who delivers on-air exorcisms. The activists - a team of technicians, actors and a former journalist - post footage of their successful 'busts' spliced with their own campaign messages on their website, newsbreakers.org.
'Television news today is a voyeur's fantasy,' said Chris Landon, who set up Newsbreakers while working in a TV newsroom in New York. 'It has shifted from the role of challenging those in power to exploiting the weak, or those involved in personal tragedy.
'TV defines reality for a lot of people ... We just want to startle them enough to disrupt that view of reality.'
Their tactics have upset producers at stations whose bulletins have been sabotaged. 'I'm not sure they're doing a good job of getting out the message of what they'd like to see changed,' said Lori Robertson, managing editor of the American Journalism Review. 'Most of the news directors I've seen quoted don't understand what their complaint is.'
Independent analysis appears to support claims that much US TV news is banal or irrelevant. A study by the Washington DC-based Project for Excellence in Journalism highlighted a three-stage 'hook-and-hold' approach favoured by almost all local stations. The lead story is weak but strongly visual: for example, a live report from a fire. Harder news stories about politics and business run shorter in the middle, and the final stories are human interest items.