Newsworld: The Gentler, Softer All-News Network?
From the Ottawa Citizen:
Consumers of television news looking for obvious signs of bias should listen for the subtle sounds of propaganda in the music played during nightly newscasts, new research shows.
Carleton University’s James Deaville studied the background music used by CBC Newsworld and CNN in the news coverage following the 9/11 attacks, and found a decidedly more gentle sound north of the border.
”It had a martial component, but it moved towards a softer sound,” the music professor said in an interview.
”I think CNN was both trying to play on the tragedy and the fear, to say that this isn’t over yet and it’s an ongoing thing.
”It had a strong tone of revenge in the music. With the CBC, you just didn’t get that. Maybe it was too Canadian. It wasn’t advocating a rash response. It was an attempt to step back.”
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Perhpas the kinder gentler CBC news music scores can be explained by the fact that Canada was not the object of the 9/11 attacks. Canada did not send soldiers to Iraq in the immediate aftermath. Canadians did not feel as threatened as Americans.
Canadians did not have the same investment in the nightly 9/11 news as Americans. Canadians were in a better position to step back and ponder to more relaxed, less militaristic music.
To analyze this by saying it was “too Canadian” is simplistic.
I don’t know about Newsworld, but on the other side of the pond I ended up tuning Sky News out during the Iraq invasion, as it was just unwatchably propagandized. But they recorded some stellar ratings over the same period, so I was in the minority in doing so.
Chances are the real reason for the over-the-top music wasn’t that Americans felt more threatened, but that the same people that own Sky News realised that more dramatic news coverage meant better ratings, and the other for-profit networks followed suit rather than risk the hit taking a more reasonable stance would have caused.
And of course, it’s not worth pointing out that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, is it?
Deaville’s study seems a bit like another of those reports from the Institute for Studies of the Obvious. Is Deaville going for another boilerplate “Canada good, America bad” trope? Movies have scores to set the emotional tone, and so does just about every news”feature” and documentary with music you see these days. The music is typically there to support the documentary maker’s agenda, and to sway the viewer via emotion, even if the facts aren’t facts or the logic is fallacious. As I like to remind people, The Triumph of the Will is a documentary, and Riefenstahl pretty much wrote the book on this stuff.
Here is to Ramones as background music for news!!!
Wow – quite a timely article for the Ottawa Citizen, of course itself being devoid and immune to all propaganda
I think a lot more than the CNN music got militarized after 9/11. The US is a militaristic culture, for sure, but if you look at the skewing of fashion and vehicle design (esp. Honda) after 9/11, you can also see there an increased tendency towards military styles. Video game producers also became extremely interested in producing first-person military simulation titles, while strategy titles fell off the map.
I’d have to agree that the main reason for the more dramatic music would be to build ratings and not necessarily because it was America that had been terrorized.
Why make it an either/or, a ratings war or threatened public dichotomy, to explain the militaristic musical scores backing US news? Wouldn’t a threatened US public feed numbers to news programs producing an aggressive militarized nightly package? And if that caused a spike in ratings, wouldn’t news programs keep it up, as long as the mood lasted?
And yes, we knew that 9/11 and Iraq had nothing to do with one another, but the US goverment and media were selling that link to the US public. CBC radio did a compelling piece on Iraq-bound soldiers and their families being shown 9/11 twin tower footage non-stop in a family centre in Fort Bragg. A ten year old son of a soldier said his Daddy was going over Iraq to make sure Saddam didn’t attack America again.
It would be interesting to study the present-day musical scores of Iraq war coverage to see if they’ve changed.