Hilary Clinton probably said it best when comparing US news to Al Jazeera English:
You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and… the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.’
Some of that stuff “we do on our news” seems to be a constant anthropomorphism–the humanizing of animals and objects–which is so pervasive one barely notices until leaving the US.
Take the water-sking squirrel above, which appeared as feature story on NBC or the routine image of suns wearing sunglasses during the weather report:
In a feature story about snake culling in Florida, NBC news editors felt compelled to illustrate a serious piece with this graphic of a snake with eyeballs, which actually winks at viewers.
Do American broadcasters see their adult audience as children, spoon-feeding them news as a mother would imitate an airplane while feeding her baby?
And what’s going on here, with the anchors doing push-ups on set?
To find out, read my latest piece in Bold Magazine, where I gauge where American news is heading and the threat posed to it by the launch of Al Jazeera USA.
