Dark Horses

Television news, as is well known, possesses the defects of its virtues: complementing its gifts of speed, immediacy, and dramatic impact are an insistent stress on movement, visual appeal, exaggerated brevity. The net effect, says media critic Edwin Diamond in Good News, Bad News (MIT Press, $12.50), is to reduce the practice of TV journalism, all too often, to the level of ephemera.

In the political context, Diamond adds, these unfortunate qualities interfuse malignly with the desire of candidates and their advertising agents to project amorphous images, appealing to the maximum possible number of people, rather than taking a specific stand on issues. Diamond traces the workings of those factors in the election of 1976, suggesting the coverage of that campaign failed to come up with much by way of substance because it was so enmeshed in personality studies and sidebars. These tendencies, he argues, are lapping over from the electronic media into print.

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About the Author

M. Stanton Evans

Television news, as is well known, possesses the defects of its virtues: complementing its gifts of speed, immediacy, and dramatic impact are an insistent stress on movement, visual appeal, exaggerated brevity. The net effect, says media critic Edwin Diamond in Good News, Bad News (MIT Press, $12.50), is to reduce the practice of TV journalism, all too often, to the level of ephemera.

In the political context, Diamond adds, these unfortunate qualities interfuse malignly with the desire of candidates and their advertising agents to project amorphous images, appealing to the maximum possible number of people, rather than taking a specific stand on issues. Diamond traces the workings of those factors in the election of 1976, suggesting the coverage of that campaign failed to come up with much by way of substance because it was so enmeshed in personality studies and sidebars. These tendencies, he argues, are lapping over from the electronic media into print.