Watching the eyewitless news.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Infotainment

Jimmy Cagney, the ultimate street-smart wise guy, used to snap, "Whadya hear? Whadya know?" in the days of black-and-white movies and Read All About IT! headlines. But that was then and this is now. Today, when gangsta rap has replaced gangster movies, and television has replaced newsprint as the primary source of information (for two-thirds of us, the only source), Cagney's famous question is not only antiquated, it is beside the point. What we hear when we consume "the news" has only the most marginal relationship to what we know about anything.

I'm not referring here to CNN or the "evening news" on the national broadcast networks. I'm referring to what passes for news in the homes and minds of the vast majority of Americans today: the Eyewitless, Happy Talk local newscasts that run in many cities for as much as an hour and a half to two hours a day, on as many as seven or eight different channels.

The rise of local news, the infotainment monster that ate the news industry, is a long and painful story about a key battlefront in the endless media war between capitalism and democracy, between the drive for profits and the constitutional responsibility of those licensed to use the airwaves to serve the public interest. We know who's winning, of course. The game was rigged from the start.

To make sure it stays that way, most members of the Federal Communications Commission are appointed--no matter who's in the White House--from the ranks of the industry itself. Indeed, if there is any phenomenon that gives dramatic support to Leonard Cohen's baleful lines, "Everybody knows the war is over/ Everybody knows the good guys lost," it's the specter of local news, slouching roughly across a wider and wider stretch of airwave time, planting its brainless images as it goes.

Local news as we know it was invented in 1970, the brainchild of a marketing research whiz hired by the industry to raise ratings by finding out what audiences "wanted to see." The Jeffersonian notion that public media should cover what citizens "need to know" was not a big consideration. Nor was it a concern to respect the audience's intelligence or diversity. The researchers offered a limited, embarrassingly vapid list of choices of formats and subjects, while ignoring the possibility that different groups might want different kinds of information and analysis. More annoying still, they ignored the possibility that individual viewers, of all kinds, might want and need different things at different times for different reasons. Nope, said the marketing whizzes, this master model of "The News" will buy us the most overall-ratings bang per buck. Wrap it up and send it out.

And it worked. Their invention has conquered the TV world. The sets, the news lineups, the anchors, the weather maps, the sports features--all developed for a New York City market--quickly became a universal formula, sent out to every network affiliate and independent station in America, complete with fill-in-the-blanks guidelines for adaptation to any community, no matter how large or small, urban or rural. Local news today is the single most profitable form of nonfiction...