My Brilliant TV Career

by Bruce Schimmel

I interviewed a couple months ago for a lifestyle reporter position on television -- the prospect of which I found enormously amusing, because it is a medium that I do not like.

It's an axiom of the news biz that you should report what you know. And so I was already at somewhat of a disadvantage to be a lifestyle reporter on TV. I lacked both a merchandisable lifestyle and a fully operational television.

I don't have an antenna, a satellite or cable. I use my television exclusively for DVDs, and I haven't followed local TV news for decades.

Besides, as I explained to the station owner who conducted the interview, I didn't own any shiny shoes and looked less than convincing in a spiffy suit.

My interview strategy succeeded brilliantly. I not only was not offered the job, the station management subsequently abolished the position of lifestyle reporter. The deficit would be taken up by reporters doing features and consumer news.

I love radio and newspapers because their pictures are so vivid, and because those images are born from words brought to life in people's imaginations. Because images that come from ideas often have more truth than pictures alone.

I hate TV, because it has become nothing but pictures, and its words offer little more than the shadow of ideas.

Television is primarily, overwhelmingly, a visual medium. It has increasingly become even more so, as screens have grown and people's attention spans have shrunk.

It is, of course, a chicken-and-egg problem as to whether television has contributed to its audience's diminished capacity, or whether distracted viewers are driving TV to be more intensively visual, and more exclusive of thought.

Either way, the cycle of unreason has brought us purveyors of factoids like CNN, Fox and MSNBC, whose formatting intentionally divides the viewers' already attenuated attention.

Between the news crawls, the mutating logos, the background pictures and inset stills -- not to mention what is being said -- how many channels of information would you estimate a news channel puts out on a single screen? Eight? Ten, maybe?

It's like patting your head while rubbing your belly. Then, add jumping up and down on one foot -- and now try to comprehend a complex thought. Can't be done, which is why so much that is seen and heard on news television is the intellectual equivalent of junk food.

Too much is simply not enough.