Jody Hassett, a senior news producer for CNN, talked about the substance and quality of TV news during her Summer Session lecture on July 30. Charles Harrington/University Photography
The average soundbite of news on TV has been reduced from 40 seconds in the 1960s to 15 seconds in 1997, said Jody Hassett.
Hassett, senior international news producer in CNN's Washington bureau, concedes that we live in an era of the electronic fragment. Even though 60 percent of Americans get their news from television, Hassett said, TV news does not offer much in terms of complexity or eloquence.
In her Summer Sessions lecture July 30 before a David L. Call Alumni Auditorium audience, Hassett discussed "Language, Information and the Media: Sticking Up for Substance in the Land of Soundbites." Now in her ninth year with CNN, Hassett produces the daily stories out of the White House and was part of the Emmy award-winning team that covered the Oklahoma City bombing.
Hassett took the audience behind the scenes of how news programming is made, putting it in relation to what the public sees on the tube. One of her frustrations is the pace and style of news broadcasts, she said. Due to time constraints of the half-hour news show, Hassett said, "We are forced to have a non-stop preoccupation with the here and the now. No image is too violent or too significant, and all images are equally compelling to watch." She said one way she would change how news is broadcast is to have a longer format for each story.
Hassett's job requires her to put together a daily story lasting two to three minutes and update it throughout the day. In that time, she said, she struggles with gauging how much viewers know about the background of the story. According to Hassett, this is the real difference between television and newspapers or magazines: "You can reread the same news story over and over in the newspaper. You can't do that with television."
Hassett also explained the phenomenon of "telereality." "What you are seeing on television is not the real thing. Even if the story is live, the story is presented differently from how it is really happening. You are being seduced by visuals and a television anchor telling you what happened." Behind the scenes, Hassett said, four or five people are making decisions about what angles to shoot, what to say and how to say it, which leads to the distortion of reality.
In discussing the difficulties of covering stories live, Hassett explained that the technology for "going live at five" is becoming more accessible and cheaper for smaller stations. Hassett said, however, she feels this worsens the problem because stations have the capability to doing a story live, easily, versus providing real development of another story that is worthy of covering.
Hassett explained, from the producer's standpoint, the logistical constraints of getting experts who are not media savvy to speak on a CNN broadcast.
"It is easy to find a talking head on a topic du jour who speaks in nice, digestible soundbites, but that may not be the best person to speak on that topic. In the national media, it is easy to forget about the delightful, real people who can give the audience a deeper perspective on the issue."
Hassett said she constantly struggles
with the political soundbite in Washington, D.C. She is aware of "the focus on the spin" that the White House would like to see on the stories that emerge from Capitol Hill, for instance, but she said she has to ask herself how she would like to see the story covered. And she admits that the idea of being an insider is very seductive in trying to get the first "leak" out of the conference room.
Hassett also said she conducts a balancing act between the image on the screen and the words being spoken. "An eight-second video can change the entire tenor of what you are saying," she said.
The power of the media has not made her lose sight of what is really important, Hassett said, which is to always try to find the element of humanity in the piece that is being covered in order to remind herself of the significance of her work in the lives of real people.
During the question-and-answer period, Hassett was put on the spot to defend the negative aspects of the media business.
"I realize that I am not responsible for the entire industry," she responded. "I am responsible for my own accountability on a day-to-day basis. I have confidence that there are people in the business with integrity and with their hearts and heads in the right places."