What the World Needs Now Is Better News

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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This is the time of year when it’s traditional for critics to sum up “the year on television.” Instead, I’m going to write about something I’d like to see on TV but rarely do, mainly because it can’t be found in any program lineup, no matter how many satellite dishes you nail to the roof. What I have in mind is a news channel dedicated solely to the coverage of the powerful, the influential, and the stinking rich — a smart, vital, entertaining, investigative information pipeline that would apply the same beady-eyed intensity to the world’s movers and shakers that the History Channel lavishes on World War II or the Golf Channel applies to the intricacies of pitching wedges and putting greens. I’d call it “Elite TV.”

Not that it would be designed for the elites — on the contrary. The point would be to reveal what the wealthy actually get up to, meaning how they conduct the various businesses that affect our lives. For instance, what does George Soros do? What is his influence on the current American election campaign? What does the American Enterprise Institute do? How does MoveOn.org operate? Where are the great television documentaries on Google or Facebook or Apple or on the astonishingly rapid creation of Dubai? What’s up with those Russian oligarchs? Why does a starting partner at a top New York law firm make more money than Chief Justice John Roberts?

These are the sorts of things we should see more of on television, instead of (for example) the tiresome fad of documentaries on drug addicts, homophobic preachers, and the like we are regularly treated to on HBO, not to mention the endless drivel about the electoral chances of Obama and Hillary and Rudy featured ad nauseam elsewhere. Recently, I watched CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interview Pat Buchanan about his new book on what he believes is ailing America. Not that we found out. Ninety percent of the interview was about Mr. Buchanan’s take on the presidential “horse race” (they actually call it that), and about one minute was given over to his book. What’s ailing America? Well, that kind of journalism, for a start.

It’s true that information about our elites can be found on television, from C-Span to PBS, from Court TV to VH1, but it comes at you in such an atomized form that you haven’t a hope of piecing it all together. Charlie Rose genuflects in front of any CEO who comes before him, while the myriad offshoots of the “Lives of the Rich and Famous” genre are usually salacious and silly.

They don’t have to be. Call me superficial, but I would enjoy watching a really detailed and informative documentary about what air travel is like for those who always get to fly first-class (or “Upper Class” if you go on Virgin), starting with the private lounges they use in the airport to the way their baggage is handled to the oxygen levels in their compartments to the quality of the food they eat, the prices they pay, the air stewards who are chosen to serve them, etc. It may have been done before, but I haven’t seen it done well. No topic is as certain to create drooling envy among the masses, and you can count me in.

So, Elite TV — television that focuses on the causes of world events rather than the effects, television about people who have the ability to make things happen. The available material is surely close to infinite, as are the ways in which it could be approached, ranging from the deeply serious to the light-hearted and frothy. For example, what major social or political or business events are going on right now in New York, and what do they mean for us? Which are the most important private clubs in the city, and what influence do they have? Who are the 10 most influential journalists in the world? Why are certain entrepreneurs deemed “cool” despite their deplorable treatment of employees, while others are mocked in the press?

Just last week, there was an opportunity for a fabulous and richly comic documentary to be made about Muammar Gadhafi’s five-day state visit to Paris at the invitation of France’s breathlessly dynamic new president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Colonel Gadhafi, the Bedouin dictator of Libya, arrived in Paris looking like a particularly shady drug dealer in wraparound shades, chose to sleep outside his hotel in an enormous heated tent, made a deliberate spectacle of himself driving around town, and gleefully dissed his host to anyone who would listen.

Why — to quote the leftist French daily, Liberation — did Mr. Sarkozy “welcome without guilt the tyrant of Libya,” despite the barrage of criticism he knew he’d receive? What sort of military and economic deals were made? Could it have had something to do with the creation of 30,000 new French jobs?

Put all this stuff on one channel, avoid the deadly PBS voice-over “drone,” make it intelligent, witty, irreverent and, whenever possible, funny. If even tennis, which hardly anyone in America watches, can have its own channel, why can’t the forces that shape the world? True, they tend to be almost invisible, but what’s preventing journalists from admitting the fact? “We know this much about such-and-such a group or person, but that’s all.” Wouldn’t that be better than nothing? And if television doesn’t start offering more of this sort of thing, what are its chances of holding out against the Internet, where fearlessness reigns?

bbernhard@earthlink.net


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