By David Bauder
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - Linda Ellerbee learned a hard lesson about the insatiability of 24-hour news channels simply by trying to finish a documentary about them.
"Feeding the Beast: The 24-Hour News Revolution" was completed and delivered to the Trio network in advance of its premiere 9 p.m. EST Monday. Then two irresistible stories broke: Howard Dean's "scream" and Janet Jackson's breast.
Ellerbee retreated to the studio for some last-minute editing, making sure each event was included.
"That's the problem with doing a documentary on news and you have to turn it in a month early," she said. "News just keeps on happening."
Her program is both a colorful look at the history of CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC and a serious discussion about how they have changed the way news is reported and absorbed.
Neal Shapiro, now NBC News president, was a producer at ABC News the week that CNN began operating in 1980. He recalls being in a meeting with ABC News chief Roone Arledge at the time, and the late TV visionary had two observations: cable news was repetitive, and probably wouldn't last.
Right on one, wrong on the other.
The repetition has persisted. Cable news often feels like an endless tape loop, a phenomenon deftly lampooned recently when Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" aired the footage of Justin Timberlake exposing Jackson's breast over and over and over.
Former Clinton aide Dee Dee Myers explains how the oft-shown film of Bob Dole falling off a stage during the 1996 campaign may have contributed to an image of Clinton's opponent as being less-than-robust.
The example was rendered instantly dated by the reaction to Dean's speech the night of the Iowa caucus.
The constant recycling of images isn't just funny or annoying, though. When preparing a news special for Nickelodeon on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Ellerbee said she had to explain to children that just because they saw the footage of airplanes going into the World Trade Center again and again, it only happened once.
The tendency to turn criminal trials into soap operas is another result of the need to fill time, an imperative that comedian Dennis Miller had a unique way of explaining.
"How many dates have you been on with a woman where you were trying to fill time and anything that happened you overamplified?" he said. "You know, 'What do you do, honey?' 'I'm a court stenographer.' 'Stenography, really? How many keys are on that thing?'
"You're just trying to fill time. Just think of 24-hour news cycles as a long date."
The documentary shows a comical scene - on-camera reporters reading and trying to digest a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the 2000 presidential election - to illustrate how images are transmitted more quickly than reporters can interpret them.
"You get the impression that you're being told what's going on, that you're experiencing it in real time," Ellerbee said. "But you don't really know what's going on. It just looks good."
Two effects of 24-hour news are really counterintuitive. As noted by CNN's Christiane Amanpour, a medium built on visual images has essentially become dominated by talking heads.
Minor stories become major through overexposure, Ellerbee said.
"Many of us thought the global would become local with the advent of 24-hour news," she said. "Instead, it's the other way around. So that Laci Peterson, which is a tragic story to her family but a local story, becomes a tragic national story."
Few people are more eloquent at dissecting the weaknesses of 24-hour news than news people, which they do at length in "Feeding the Beast."
But Ellerbee said the impact is hardly all negative. Horrific images from conflicts can spur action: Amanpour believes news coverage helped shorten the war in Serbia, and former CNN correspondent Peter Arnett said he thinks the Vietnam War would only have lasted two or three years if it was in the era of cable news.
Perhaps the truest measure of impact is the sense that it's hard to remember a world without 24-hour news, even though it has only been around for two dozen years.
Ellerbee coaxes a who's who of news people to give reminiscences, including CNN founder Ted Turner and Katie Couric, who offered her first CNN report as a slightly squeaky 23-year-old. A network executive ordered her off the air permanently - an executive who's no longer there.
Although the documentary details the rise of Fox News Channel, it does so without the participation of anyone from Fox News Channel.
"It surprised me because I know myself to be a fair journalist, and I couldn't imagine that anyone else would think otherwise," she said. "But I don't take it personally."
"Feeding the Beast" ultimately provides plenty to consider why these networks operate the way they do.
"It does raise so many questions about what we think is important," Ellerbee said. "And I say we, because I include the viewer in that."
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On the Net:
http://www.triotv.com/
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://www.msnbc.com/
