How to Watch TV News

by Neil Postman, Steve Powers

A guide to watching television news discusses the calculated programming, the viewer manipulation, and the big business behind today's news networks and shows readers how to interpret what they are hearing and seeing. Original.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Audiobook, Philosophy, Sociology, Cultural, Journalism

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1991

About the author

Neil Postman, an important American educator, media theorist and cultural critic was probably best known for his popular 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. For more than four decades he was associated with New York University, where he created and led the Media Ecology program.

He is the author of more than thirty significant books on education, media criticism, and cultural change including Teaching as a Subversive Activity, The Disappearance of Childhood, Technopoly, and Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.

Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), a historical narrative which warns of a decline in the ability of our mass communications media to share serious ideas. Since television images replace the written word, Postman argues that television confounds serious issues by demeaning and undermining political discourse and by turning real, complex issues into superficial images, less about ideas and thoughts and more about entertainment. He also argues that television is not an effective way of providing education, as it provides only top-down information transfer, rather than the interaction that he believes is necessary to maximize learning. He refers to the relationship between information and human response as the Information-action ratio.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was short and to the point (well, mostly to the point). It is a bit dated, so you can skip most of the figures, but then figures like how much an ad cost to produce in 1990 go in one ear and out the other anyway.

I might use some of the ideas in this book when I’m teaching next year. This book doesn’t say, Don’t watch TV news – but it does say you should cut your TV news watching by a third and that watching TV news tends to make you depressed and fearful.

The best of this book, though, is not so much the suggestions at the end – more or less, think as you watch and come to TV news knowing stuff already rather than hoping to learn stuff from it. The best of this book are the bitchy parts about how newsrooms are populated by perfect families – the greying male presenter as dad and his wife, the female senior correspondent and their pretty and vivacious adult daughter, the weather girl and maybe a crazy uncle in the sports presenter.

I hadn’t ever thought about the significance of the ad breaks that always come just before the weather. Apparently, the weather is one of the most watched bits of the news, so they always show ads before it as this is when people are really focused. They say amusing things also about maps with Hs and Ls chasing each other around – I wonder how many people have any idea what a synoptic chart means.

The best advice in this is to remember that the News is really a Show and a very profitable one at that. It makes money by selling advertisements. There is a lovely quote from McLuhan that “Advertisements constitute the only 'good news' in the newspaper”. They also say very interesting things about the relationship between ads (think about yourself, there are simple solutions to all your problems and they are called ‘products’) and journalism (think less about yourself and more about the world you inhabit). They think this is a productive and interesting tension and one that is worth thinking about as you watch the news.

But the best of all of this book was when they spoke about how much of television news is really about modern reenactments of the seven deadly sins – politician in bed with 18 year old as one of a story or two about lust, some shots of fat kids for gluttony, some huge house sold on the coast for $25 million for avarice and so on.

The problem is that television is about pictures and about drama – it is not about analysis. So, if you want to know more about the world watching a half hour news program (interesting stat: with the same number of words as a single page of newsprint) probably isn’t really going to help you. But newspapers have similar problems in that they too are obsessed with NOW rather than how we got here or where we are likely to be going. My best advice would be to read more books than you watch television or read newspapers – it is always best to give advice you know few are likely to follow…

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't.


Well, that was easy. From television insider Steve Powers and technological critic Neil Postman comes this slim book, How To Watch Television News, which explains how televised news is produced and scrutinizes the platform's ability to deliver seriously useful information. Although this is not a takedown of television news -- at the end they merely encouraged readers to reduce their TV news consumption by a third -- it doesn't foster trust in the medium. Powers' insight reveals an industry which scrambles to stay ahead of the latest developments, seizing on whatever is most likely to keep eyes on the screen and keep the ratings high. Most readers are aware, of course, that television news programs play to the ratings: no serious journalist would focus their attention on the goings-on of celebrities otherwise. What we might fail to appreciate, however, is how carefully orchestrated television shows are, from the music chosen to the arrangement of news sequences, designed to draw viewers in and keep them fixated. Because of the pace, the need to keep as many viewers' attention as possible, and the amount of production work required to put each show together, serious journalistic pieces are impossible for something as small as the nightly news, whether it's a half-hour local news spot or an hour-long nationwide show. To truly evaluate what's happening in the world, Postman and Powers maintain, we need print media -- stories that allow us to consider ideas at length, not merely be distracted by them as objects on the screen. If readers were to reflect on the news and the commericals which it actually serves, they might see through the illusion -- and see that just as a mouthwash commericial is more about social acceptnance than mouthwash, a news show is more of a show than the actual news.

Despite its multitude of references to the eighties, How to Watch TV News is far from outdated. Powers' 2008 revision updated some references and tech, but Postman's contributions are timeless. Some of them will be familiar to anyone who has read Postman before, from his view that different technologies foster different beliefs, to the belief that television has trivialized and eroded culture in general. How To Watch Television News is less about television, however, and more about news, the barrage of facts we're told are important. Postman and Powers help us to look for the stage behind the story: why are these facts being presented, what judgments are we expected to accept in viewing them? In giving recommendations to the reader, however, Postman urges readers to realize they don't have to have an opinion about everything. This has never been more relevant than today, when the social media cloud that we're all forced to live in - -because it rains on those of us who don't use it, when people insist on talking about what they're tweeting or reading -- constantly pushes us to react to everything as if it were important. We are still a nation -- and now a globe -- amused to death, frazzled by distraction.

Also from Neil Postman:
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The Disappearance of Childhood
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

[The Brain in the Jar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neil Postman, as a philosopher, is deceptively simple. His writing is so easy that by this point it took me seconds to read a page. McLuhan’s name also appear, so it’s obvious he’s not providing new paradigms of thought. He continues McLuhan’s critical examination of technology, not taking it for granted by asking what it means. If the medium is the message, then this is book expands on news as a medium.

Before I talk about this book, I must make the theory clear. When McLuhan uses it, he means any kind of technology. For him, the newspaper and the text are two different medias. Postman takes a saner, more intiuiative approach to his theory and uses the tradition of medium as a tool for transmitting content. He examines what kind of content works better with medium according to its traits. Although it’s a different modus operandi of analysis, it’s still an extremely useful one. Actually, it’s necessary for us to understand any kind of communication.

Postman and Powers talk a lot about the importance of advertising. No one should be surprised by this. Ads are everywhere. Just go outside. An activity as innocent as waiting for the bus will involve advertising, in the station and on the bus itself. The chapters about media-as-business don’t reveal too much since, in my experience, people already perceive the TV networks as a business anyway.

The interesting and important parts are when the authors discuss what news is. It’s the type of discussion we don’t have enough. When you criticize the news, or TV, for being stupid people will reply with, ‘oh, it’s business, of course they will do what makes money’. Living in a strictly Neoliberal mindset, this makes sense. Adopting a less dogmatic mindset means asking yourself what kind of product you’re consuming. Without asking yourself this, you can’t tell the difference between a snack and a meal.

It’s this crucial distinction that makes all the figures about adverts alarming. News isn’t exactly entertainment. Things that happen in it are supposed to real. News show stand in contrast to other shows in that they’re meant to provide information. That’s why you’re angrier when Trump says ‘grab them by the pussy’ then when the Joker abuses Harley Quinn. Clearly, news are a different product than other shows, like RealiTV or cartoons.

Since news deliver information, the authors always view news by that prism. If these parts seem worrying, it’s only because they force you to ask whether you’re actually learning anything by the news. Their examination of the visual image is fantastic. It’s not an attack on the image itself. Rather, they examine what kind of information an image delivers, and what ideas work better in images.

News aren’t documentaries (A subject they sadly didn’t touch). News consists of incomplete stories framed as complete with pictures. Yet the story is so much more than a picture. A picture isn’t actually worth a thousand words since these words can contradict each other. They also point out how images express more than tell, show something concrete but don’t include context. It’s not that images are bad, but news information demands context, order, and meaning. Images aren’t enough to deliver those.

The print media also contains pictures, but then they analyze its structure. It’s another thing that’s easy to miss. The newspaper is a mosaic of images, where there is less hierarchy and more control for the reader. Although the editor decides which items will be on the paper and how much they will stick out, they can’t control the order of reading. Choosing to watch one story before the other in TV news is quite hard work. Why put all this effort into rewinding and fast-forwarding?

It’s sad that the authors didn’t emphasis the viewers’ ability to be selective on the media they consume. Although they’re not totally deterministic, Powers’ final conclusion, when discussing new technology leans towards gatekeeping. What he misses is that gatekeepers won’t necessarily care or know the well-being of the viewer. A gatekeeper by definition puts less power in the viewer’s hand. The power of selection is what we need to teach.

Some optimistic researchers will say we’re all naturally selective. I don’t think so, and the high amount of TV watching and viral content is more evidence of that. Selectivity means people will have a guideline of their own that makes them choose the content. They will not scroll the popular YouTube videos to see what’s happening, but rather search for specific topics. The internet actually does increase selectivity, mostly because you have to with all this information.

What they miss about information glut is that it demands being selective, unlike the TV. The TV, as a medium, is a regression in terms of intelligence and ability to convey information. Postman keeps proving this here. The authors missed that technology changes and can amplify parts of ourselves. Their pessimism misses the internet’s nature of information glut which forces people to be selective in some way. That said, selectivity demands critical thinking and that demands a lot of effort and our education system don’t really support it.

An interesting chapter focuses on the televising of trials. It’s one of the highlights, since it illustrates more clearly than any chapter how TV works. When a trial is televised, everyone knows that one person is tried. We’re judges by nature, and by putting someone on TV you put the person in front of millions of judges. Beyond that, the nature of summary of TV means our judgment will be quicker and less informed. Many of us will not even know what the final decision was. We’ll know someone’s been tried, assume he’s guilty or not and move on.

I agree with the authors that TV should stay out of court. They spread disinformation, not information. A person witnessing a trial is seeing it as it is, all the information with no edited highlights. On the news, you can’t show the whole trial but have to edit the highlights.

This book is directly related to Amusing Ourselves to Death. That book laid down the nature of TV and Postman’s demand for a boundary between information and entertainment. It is a discussion for a different book, but keep in mind these are some of the assumptions Postman and Powers bring. Information and entertainment must not go together. They don’t view TV as bad in and of itself, at least not in this book but merely as horrible at providing information. Although they expose their bias of technological pessimism a little later, they still lean towards being critical instead of dogmatic. After all, they provide some tools of analyzing language and these tools can be used against them. The point of the book is anyway not to make you agree with Postman so much as provide you with tools to be more critical, more on-guard.

It’s a good book on communication and media studies. It should be read by everyone since everyone is affected by the news. That said, it’s on a small scale. It doesn’t provide a theory but apply it. We need such books since sometimes theories can exist so much time in the abstract they lose any foundation in reality. Anyone expecting a series of revelation might be disappointed that this is not as ambitious as Amusing Ourselves to Death. It does provide a nice extension of the argument and is more accessible to layman, since it’s more of a toolbox than a theory. Postman’s books do sell, but they should sell more. Here is a philosopher who deals directly with life, cares deeply for being human and isn’t hard to understand at all.

3.5 fake news reports out of 5

Also posted in my blog:
https://brainweapons.wordpress.com/20...

[Ratnakar Sadasyula · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this book is about American TV News, you can as well apply the same to Indian News Channels. Substitute NBC, CNN, Fox News with NDTV, CNN-IBN, Times Now and their anchors with Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghose and co, it's pretty much the same. The figures might be outdated, but the point is driven home brilliantly. TV News is of the Idiots, by the Idiots and for the Idiots. The fact is TV News is not meant for intelligent analysis, it is basically the Masala News, where photogenic anchors, loud music, snazzy graphics, matter more than intelligent, thought provoking analysis. Most of the TV News Debates are like those staged WWE fights, utterly fake, contrived and shallow. And this book is a "Damning Expose" of that industry. A Must read, and one of the authors incidentally is an "Insider", so he knows a good deal.

['Izzat Radzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The discourse is not just on tv news, it actually also covers child education, televised court trial (which profit the tv companies), and a few chapters of technical stuff of the production of Tv News, perhaps because of the collaboration with Steve Powers, who is in the industry. And unfortunately, because of that, I didn't quite enjoyed his part, because I find when Postman wrote on something, he wrote in in a totally different way, or should better put in, philosophical way.
They did suggest in the closing chapters on how to deal with tv news.
One is to reduce it amongst other like educating people on how to watch tv news.
And it's a bit peculiar in tge argumentation inside, as he sort of slanted into Jerry Mander's style-maybe because the effect of watching tv is as it is- as he previously criticised him in his earlier, popular work :Amusing Ourselves to Death.

3.5 at best (would go to 4.5 if not the technicalities)

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook. I gave it 4/5 stars because Amusing Ourselves to Death is better, and if you had to pick one, read Amusing Ourselves to Death. How to Watch TV News is great for learning discernment in consuming the news. Even though it's about television news and now most people get their news from the internet, much of the stuff that attracts clicks is the same as the stuff that attracted viewers in the 1990s. The medium may change but human nature stays the same.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calling a text a good "introductory" text can sometimes sound, and is often meant as a dig. Without getting too deep into the weeds about what values about reading and reviewing are indexed in that premise, I think this is a pretty great, if simple text to put in front of students who might otherwise go on to grow up without any reflexes to challenge whats on screen or worse-- complain that "nobody taught us media literacy in schools!"

How do you watch TV News? You don't! Or at least, you watch with a realistic sense of what you're actually watching. You acknowledge that TV news is driven by commerce and is engineered in such a way to keep you watching while sacrificing your depth of insight into a topic and, probably most maliciously, lulling many into a false sense that they're "plugged in" and informed.

I was a journalist and anchor and have a degree in Mass Communications, and so much of this at first seemed like excruciating common sense. This is, of course, unfair to assume-- and here we come to what it means to call something a "good introduction" as if condescendingly patting it on the head.

In a very real sense, I think it's strong and accessible enough to be taught in schools to any kid. Any high school Journalism class should treat it as syllabus. It's very good for bringing a "question everything" scrutiny to mass media and developing a sense of credulity necessary to be a global citizen. If you've already got those instincts, most of this will roll like water down your back. For a big Postman fan like myself, I found myself constantly sighing, thinking "come on man-- is that all?" Sadly it is.

For a short book that warns against brevity in the information age, this one can be trusted.

[Guina Guina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though dated, this slim book delivers lots of good advice about how to take in media of all kinds, which is never out of date. Postman and Powers frame the news industry as the money-making entity that it is, with 'news' being designed to bring in an audience first and to inform that audience as a secondary objective.

I enjoyed the end especially, where the authors put together a list of things to consider/do when watching television news.

I realize now that there is a revised edition of this book, so I have to go and seek that out to see what has been updated.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now I know how! Just don't.

[Ericka Clou · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent 1990's book that correctly warned us about the decline of journalistic standards and television news.

[Chrisanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first section of the book gets old after a bit--- yes, after a couple of chapters, we get it. The news is a glitzed up, doctored show. But the next bit, that sounds more like Postman, is more valuable. What do we do, now that we know about it? He offers genuine advice based on previous research: The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. One of the things I like about Postman is that he doesn't isolate his research. It's all interconnected, just like life, and he's fine with that.

I liked Camus' idea of a prequel to each show, etc. I also think that all of those that cry "Fake news" should do some serious studying of the subject. "Fake"-ness isn't a partisan quality so much as it is related to monetary gain.

[Ardyth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even in these days of website editions of tv news there is much that still applies. Some of it is even more relevant as our clips and soundbytes get shorter. The monetary factors that contribute to broadcaster and marketing choices have, of course, inflated quite a lot.

If, like me, you've already read Postman's _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ and Belloc's _The Free Press_, very little here will surprise you. It's more like an update on those which is now slightly (but not entirely!) dated.

If you haven't read those, and/or are beginning to examine the ways in which tv shows operate in our capitalist system, this has a lot to offer... minimal jargon and direct language makes for a very readable text. Maybe look up inflation rates between publication date & today ahead of time, though, so you can estimate current USD valuations during the one chapter where that matters.

In either case -- the final chapter with actionable advice on managing how we consume news shows is worth at least a library borrow. It goes well beyond "reduce how much you watch" and into value decisions you should have in mind before you ever grant access to your eyeballs.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a quick read, and a nice overview of the structure of entertainment news programs and factors that influence the content. Postman however, seems to suffer from the same problem as many other well-educated people accustomed to writing for academic journals. In crossing over to popular writing, the effort to use clear, concise, and simple language makes the tone feel as though the author is talking down to the reader, as if s/he is not yet capable of critical thought. Additionally, in what must have been an effort to cloud the writing with too many references, the language is rife with weasel words and other rhetorical devices.

That said, it is an interesting book for those interested in thinking more critically about the content of TV news. Those with a background in critical/cultural theory however, may find it infuriating.

[Rebecca Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. The figures are a bit dated, it having been published 20 years ago and all, but extremely valuable anyway. Perhaps at the time of publication, the issue of government controlled and worldview 'propaganda' in news and television were not quite as pernicious but the expounding on such was the only thing, in my opinion, this book lacked.

An eye-opening read for anyone who watches the TV news.

A Favorite Quote:

"What people don't know can kill them (to borrow from Fred Friendly, formerly of CBS news). To this might be added that what people do not know can keep them from knowing what they must know. In other words, the pseudo-news show fixes peoples' attention on what is peripheral to an understanding of their lives and may even disable them from distinguishing what is relevant from what is not." -pg. 94

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I wouldn't say this book is profound, it does contain valuable insight that will change the way you view your network and cable news programs. The most interesting question posed in the book is "what is news?". I think a lot of people are aware of the type-casting of news personalities and the bias in reporting as well as the unnecessary glamour in news reporting but I'm afraid most of us forget to even ponder what should be considered news and are we in danger of "information glut" that the "need" for constant reporting leads to. Really it is enough to make you forsake the news all together.

[Hilary "Fox" · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not quite what I was expecting, but not bad at all. This book dissects the work that goes into cobbling together a television news program - from the way that news is gathered to the way that the shows are produced. The actual discussion of the problems with television news programs are confined to the latter chapters, but I can understand the reasoning for this for by the time you get to them you understand what goes into the shows a bit better. Would make an excellent textbook, but requires supplemental material to truly be appreciated.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's the thing. This book is outdated. You're not going to glean much from this that you didn't already know. And Postman, at times, sacrifices insight for glibness. But from a historical point of view (this book was published in the early 1990s), he's spot on--year's before these ideas became a mainstream way of thinking about TV news. It's a must-read for those interested in the effects of TV news on public & community rhetoric.

[Elizabeth Theiss Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postman's media ecology perspective on TV news caused me to give up TV news almost entirely, though I confess that I still love the PBS News Hour. The limitations of the medium (time constraints, necessity of profits, need for drama and human interest) are such that it just isn't very useful for understanding the world. Postman and Powers explain why with zest and plenty of examples. Though brief and entertaining, this book is brilliant.

[Alicia Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tended to overstate its points, but they're good points. It made me rethink the way I watch TV news. That is, I know it's all mindless entertainment--celebrity gossip, pundits, sound bites, etc. But I'd never thought about how watching the news makes one feel informed without necessarily being informed. "We know of many things (everything is revealed) but about very little (nothing is known)."

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neil Postman is absolutely brilliant most of the time, though this is certainly not my favorite book by him. This one is an insightful analysis of what exactly "the news" is and how it is created, marketed, and delivered. You may think you already know the answer, but this book forces you to think about this in a serious way. Definitely worth reading, if only once.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing in here will be new to a reasonably well-educated person, or a consumer of a variety of news sources. It probably seemed fresher when the first edition came out, in 1992. It might serve well as a text for a high school media class.

If you want to learn about how bad media destroys democracy, read www.dailyhowler.com every day.

[Doyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read with valid core concepts everyone should know. Although some data is dated as a lot of other people point out in their reviews, after reading this you will research on your own to validate. A must read for anyone with a television set or who watches news or commercials via other mediums.

[Aketzle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really outdated, but still very informative. I wonder what the authors of this book think now! This was before the rise of Fox "News," so things now are far, far worse than they were when they first saw the need for a book like this. It was very easy to read - definitely recommended to all citizens of our democracy. It makes you think in different ways about the information you're being fed.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly 20 years old it stands the test of time well as much of how news is produced remains the same although done by fewer people and new technologies.

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great! Anyone who still believes that TV news is unbiased or (in some cases) even news at all, will have those illusions shattered with this book. First published in 1992 and still holds up.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for everyone!!! This slender but excellent book will make you a better and more informed news consumer. *Side note: Postman also wrote the fantastic book Amusing Ourselves to Death. I highly recommend both.

The boundary between news and entertainment has been blurred. I would say this is even more true since the advent and proliferation of social media.

There's so much good stuff in this book, here are just a few things that jumped out to me.

"There will always be some errors in news gathering, but the tricks that microphones, cameras and film make possible must never be contrived to pass off news events that were fabricated to document an event that was missed or which may never have happened." Edward R. Murrow (This quote is from the chapter that discusses reenactments and docudrama.)

Chapter 6 discusses video news releases (VNRs) and soundbites. VNRs (p. 80) are paid for by governments, corporations, or other organizations and sent to news stations. In 2005 the Center for media and democracy complained to the FCC about 111 TV stations using VNRs without identifying them as such. As far back as 1994, Nielsen noted that 100% of stations used VNRs with 80% of stations using them several times per month.

People often get into a frenzy over soundbites they've heard. But soundbites can be cut so easily and taken out of context. AND the average sound bite (p. 84) has shrunk. "According to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the average length of sound bites by presidential candidates on the network nightly news has dropped to 7.3 seconds, a 26 percent decline since 1988 (9.8 seconds) and 83 percent since the 1968 presidential campaign." "...in 1975...the average soundbite ran 16 seconds." YIKES! Two independent studies have confirmed this trend.

And that's just national elections. What does this mean for local politics and elections? I'm sure it depends on market. Postman and Powers note that some stations give short shrift to election issues. University of Wisconsin studied 9 mid-western markets in October 2006 and found that they devoted an average of 36 seconds (YES, you read that right) to election news "in the thirty days following the traditional Labor Day campaign kickoff", while they featured 10 minutes of advertising, 7 minutes of sports and weather, and 2.5 minutes of crime stories. (p. 85).

Local news stations have 10 minutes of advertising! Elsewhere in the book (I wrote this down but not the page and can't find it after a quick perusal) notes that the average USA viewer sees over 39,000 minutes of ads. While approx. 25,000 different commercials air on network television each year (p. 119).

Children are the most avid group of TV viewers. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 40 percent of 3-month-olds watch TV or videos an average of 45-minutes a day - or 5 hours per week (p. 141). (This is something they do not encourage.) Kiddos between ages 2 and 12, watch an average of 25 hours of television per week. Children watch about 5,000 hours of TV before entering the first grade. By the end of high school, the average American youngster has spent 19,000 hours in front of a TV set compared to 13,000 hours in school (if they attend regularly).They are exposed to 13,000 killings, 200,000 violent episodes, and around 650,000 commercials by age 18 (p. 142).

A comprehensive study by the National Institute of Mental Health and investigators from the University of Chicago done over 13 years concluded that "television makes people passive, tense and unable to concentrate; more skill and concentration are required in the act of eating than in watching television; although people assume that TV watching offers relaxation and escape, it actually leaves people in worse moods than they were before watching television." (p. 143). The researchers uncovered enough data that led them to suggest that children should be educated in the art of TV watching so they will be less easily manipulated. {Actually, this would be good for us grown-ups as well. I have seen many friends or family members be anxious, tense and angry after watching TV, and some of them it was pre-pandemic. It got particularly bad last year for obvious reasons.}

Overall, the authors reiterate that TV tends to turn news into a form of entertainment, "in part because so much information is available that news has lost its relevance and meaning.

Americans are no longer clear about what news is worth remembering or how any of it is connected to anything else." We have become "the least knowledgeable people in the industrialized world. We know of many things (everything is revealed) but about very little (nothing is known)." (p. 151)

Read this book for more insights and let's all become better and more knowledgeable individuals.

[Vincent Waldron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neil Postman was a bit of a curmudgeon. His book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a classic and addresses a number of aspects of the media entertainment industry. Here, he and Steve Powers take on TV newsrooms and address problematic aspects of the news environment.

Throughout the book, they note a number of aspects of TV journalism that make it problematic as a source for knowledge of the world around us. For one thing, most newsrooms exist to sell advertising. They can sell those ads based on viewership -- not based on the accuracy or quality of the news stories that the produce. With this in mind, the things they choose to put on the air tend to be fairly salacious.

Postman and Powers also think that the need for moving pictures to accompany a news story makes it so that certain stories get less coverage. They posit that the reason why courtroom stories dominate so much is because it is possible to get clips with lots of drama in them. If it were possible, news outlets would love to have clips of the actual crimes that generated these court cases.

The authors think that TV news stories are too brief to give a real understanding. If you want to understand what is going on in the world, you would be wise to turn your attention to print media, where the newsrooms are bigger and there is more space to explain what is going on.

They are also bothered that news anchors are chosen based on looks rather than on knowledge of the world and that they therefore only read copy -- they don't choose it. The fact that Dan Rather, in the early 1990s, was making 3 million dollars for attracting more eyeballs to his news program really seemed to annoy them.

I think the authors say that you should watch less TV News, should definitely avoid having children watch it, and should turn more to print media. People who watch a lot of news programs will not have a better understanding of the world around them, but they certainly will have an increased level of fear.

The book is short and feels pretty dated. Many of the things that are said about TV news could be applied to internet news sites which are definitely ad drive and focus on the most salacious stories. Print media is mostly dead now with the only hold outs being the big companies -- the Wall Street Journal and NY Times. Even they have a large online presence. Many of the statistics about advertising sales and news anchor salaries feel like so much filler as do descriptions of how a newsroom is setup and filmed. I suppose the biggest things to consider is that what news stories we read about and the quality of the reporting in those stories will affect how we view the world around us. Maybe that's enough to recommend this book, but probably not.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A longtime critic of American news media and its consumers, Neil Postman and television journalist Steve Powers wrote "How to Watch TV News" in 1992. By the time of his death some ten years later (2003), Postman must have recognized that the internet was making the situation even worse than he described in this book. Now, a quarter of a century later, his assessments of the future of news are as remarkable as the fact that this book and his advice remain relevant and even invaluable today.
The authors address the subject in twelve chapters, beginning by framing the question - are you watching the news or (even more relevant with today's internet news) is the news watching you? Subsequent chapters dig into what exactly is TV news, who is responsible for its preparation and presentation, and how do all of these contributors do their jobs. They also spend a chapter each examining the contribution of language and images as news content as well as how commercials interact with and pay for the news you watch (today via click-thrus). One other chapter discusses the issues relating to the courts and television news coverage.
The last two chapters present advice and equip the reader/viewer with new tools and recommended viewing habits (less is more!). These are still excellent and relevant even in the internet news age we face today.

[Kiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neil Postman’s writing is perhaps the most prescient and relevant wisdom I have encountered on our current cultural crises as it pertains to the access to and literacy with which we process news media. Written in 1992, Postman and Powers wrote about the alarming rise of entertainment and for-profit news, that doesn’t inform, that gives the illusions of a full story, that leaves the citizen falsely confident in their knowledge of local and global events, and slanted toward a feeling the world is more dangerous than it is. Even before internet dominance they were analyzing and predicting a steep decline in information literacy based on poor education of how news media works, and declining shared virtues as a society. Reading it in our current time, one can’t help but acquire a sinking feeling and wonder, why can’t we do better, why aren’t we? 178 pages or 4 hours of that rare commodity of late, research, wisdom, and careful thought.

[Leanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think that if I had read this back in 2007 (or whatever year it came out) I may have had more interest. I can imagine how over a decade later that the production of a news story has become even more frenzied for the creators to produce than what was identified in this book. Most of the revelations in this book have become more blatantly obvious to the viewers. I think that news quality has slipped so much and the extreme sensationalism is so evident that even those facts addressed in this book are mild in comparison to what we are witnessing today. In my opinion, the news "has jumped the shark". I did like being reminded how videos and stories are framed for the viewers. Can't hear that enough. I will take one timeless suggestion from this book and cut my news viewing by a third. Seems like a healthy move.