The AP's David Bauder offers a thought-provoking piece this morning about how technology is changing The Cable Game. Taking note of the cell-phone videos that figured so prominently in the news stories about comedian Michael Richards and his onstage meltdown and then, of course, Saddam Hussein and his see-it-now hanging, Bauder noted that 70 percent of Americans have cell phones, and of those, a quarter have cell phones with video capability. That's some 55 million people, just in the US. That's a lot of new content for cable news to process. (The other big source of new video would seem to be security cameras, but that's a separate phenomenon, to be considered more fully another time.)
Obviously there are issues of quality and reliability--not to mention that such phones don't (yet) have audio capability--but the reality is that today, tens of millions of potential newsmen, and newswomen (and newschildren), now patrol the streets, ready to put news on cable, or YouTube, or their own personal blog. It's going to prove to be a paradigm-shifting phenomenon, with two obvious impacts that we can at least begin to grasp now:
First, it's going to continue to change cable news. Obviously there will be more "hand held" stuff submitted to cable gatekeepers, some of it quite compelling, such as the footage from the Corey Lidle airplane crash site in NYC that Fox News managed to air using a satellite transmission.
But at the same time, media ubiquity, and its handmaiden, cornucopia, will put a huge burden on those gatekeepers to decide what to show--indeed, to be sure that it's totally real. I think that cablers made the right decision to show the lead-up, but not the conclusion, of the Saddam hanging. (It was, of course, possible to watch the whole thing on the Net.) But inevitably, there will be issues of fraud. For example, three was the case in Indonesia of the plane crash, in which authorities initially said that they had found the wreckage, and some survivors, only to retract that claim a day or so later. But in the meantime, if someone had produced cell phone footage of aircraft parts strewn around the ground, would cable news outfits--and other media outlets--been able to resist showing it? Fortunately, nobody did, but the combination of a hot but bogus news item, plus video, might well be irresistible to some newsers.
Second, if the revolution--and everything else--will be televised, then it puts a premium on the visual management of everything. The Saddam hanging was a p.r. disaster for the Iraqi government and, indirectly, the U.S. Saddam was one of the worst dictators and mass-murderers of the last century, and yet his ill-treatment, mild as it was in context, played poorly in the cell-phoned media. So yes, there was a little bit of sympathy for this devil, as we watched him in his last moments, knowing, as we did from other news accounts, that he was mocked by his hangmen.
Jim Pinkerton made a good suggestion about this on "Fox News Watch" on Saturday night. He said that what the authorities--Iraqi, American--should have done was to set up an image gallery of Saddam's many crimes, for worldwide consumption. That is, not just pictures of the Shia in that village, the ones that he massacred, but also pictures of the Kurds that he gassed, and all his other crimes, including two wars that he started, against Iran in 1980 and against Kuwait in 1990.
Imagine the difference in the perception of Saddam's execution if the condemned man had walked the Last Mile past pictures and other evidence from those who were condemning him--the hundreds of thousands of people he had killed. As Pinkerton said, the authorities should've set it up like the Nuremberg trials in 1945-6, when the elaborate presentation of evidence and testimony made it crystal clear to all what the Nazis had done. That high level of thought about it going to be needed again, all the more, when everyone has a cell phone, then everyone is always going to be one step away from being "on the air," at least potentially.
Or to put it another way, if you know that you might be on TV on a moment's notice, it will behoove you to keep up your appearance--and also, hopefully, behave better. That close-up, as well as history's verdict, could be just a few seconds away.
They say that your conscience is that which guides you when nobody's looking. Well, increasingly, the odds are that somebody is looking, and watching, and recording, and even broadcasting.
