When I teach technical writing, I trot out a skippy, cover-weary VHS tape of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf briefing the press on the state of the Gulf War in 1991. I don't fire it up to teach military strategy-- I am often outwitted by the spider which insists upon making a home in the living room corner-- but to illustrate that back in The Day, all that was needed to tell a story was a couple of maps and a great big pointer.
I use the tape in media classes, too, to illustrate how significantly news coverage has changed since the Internet made us a twenty-four hour society. For what truly strikes my students about the tape, which many view as a historical curiosity, not unlike a flint arrowhead or humanoid skull, is the gleaming nakedness of the screen. You see Schwarzkopf, you see an ABC news logo at the beginning of the broadcast, and you see a very occasional chyron noting the time and the location of the briefing-- which then goes away. He commands attention not only through his public speaking skills, but... well, there's nothing else to look at.
Those crawls which skitter across the bottom of every news channel were posted on 9/11 to track several developing stories at once and to transmit important information-- and they never went away. Now, any minute deemed necessary for modern pop culture survival, including one actual "breaking news" item that Madonna had fallen off a horse in England, invades everyday life.
The reliance on MTV-inspired visual candy is almost beyond parody; during last night's Vice Presidential debate, Fox News didn't even wait for the end of the thing to invite viewers to vote in a texting poll in an enormous banner across the bottom of the screen. CNN panted after poll junkies by superimposing a focus group tracking graph as the candidates held forth. And nearly every channel opened its broadcast with loud, flashing rampups normally seen prior to football games.
And that's why I watched most of the debate on C-SPAN (DISH Network channel 210), which invaded its visual space with a comparatively non-invasive small ribbon of text across the bottom of the screen reminding the viewers of the question the candidates were currently addressing. May God bless it; C-SPAN, with its almost utter lack of commentary and delightfully non-existent 3D graphics, stands virtually alone in its plodding instance on presenting information unfiltered. Representatives address the chamber about resolutions concerning International Migratory Bird Day; all you see is the party and state. Bills pass or fail; only the roll call appears on the screen. Nobody informs the electorate what to think about what just happened.
As this election gets closer and louder, C-SPAN functions as more than an accidentally amusing throwback. It's a calming invitation to make up your own mind about the international importance of migratory birds.
