cable news is alarming

Music: Iron & Wine: Around the Well (2009)

Y'all can file this post under the "where've you been, Sherlock?" category, because what I say will be obvious to most of you. Still, it's something akin to "emotional news" to me. I'm astonished by cable programming; it makes me feel like I might die tomorrow.

A couple of weeks ago I had cable installed. I do not watch a lot of television, and what I do watch consists mostly of news and court television shows (I turn on the latter I'm working for a sense of "company," as well as the occasional distraction). I've been working very hard to make myself watch television. Last night I decided to clean the house, but had FOX News and CNN on for a few hours.

I was surprised not by the content, but by the tone of this "news" programming. The O'Reilly Factor and the show on after it was alarmist in character, and the irony of "we report it, you decide" was amusing. On CNN I listened to Nancy Grace as I swept and mopped. This show was also very apocalyptic: it was as if John Williams scored the doom-and-gloom motifs that faded in an out of commercial interruptions and courtroom drama. Yes, I've watched this stuff in the past when traveling or visiting others, but I've never been alone with a television set for two weeks watching cable; it makes me feel funny.

Trying to make sense of these feelings, I can only grasp at two concepts: flow and tone. In television studies, Raymond Williams advanced the concept of "flow" to explain how television producers tried to get audiences to experience a feeling of continuity between programs by doing things to keep them in front of the set. Commercials were incorporated into programs; credits would feature bloopers from the show, or dump the viewer right into the opening sequence of the next program. Williams meant to indicate that "flow" was a perceptual suspension of temporality as well as an affective dimension or "structure of feeling" that made you want to never leave the screen.

Some have argued that, with hundreds of channels and the variety of cable programming, narrowcasting and nitsch programming have destroyed "flow." Now we DVR our favorite programs and, consequently, flow has disintegrated. I disagree. The auratic quality of these "cable news" shows is tremendous and high energy; the affective tone of the programs and operatic emotions they attempt to evoke are stronger than anything I've ever sensed from television. I know most of y'all are used to this, but I found myself sucked into these programs such that I didn't realize it was past my bedtime. Not sure what else to say, except that flow is a tone, and the tone is alarmist.

Yeah, yeah, this is all obvious. Still, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I think my recent sensitivity toward haters and violence may simply be my adjustment to cable television. Huh.