Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #905473 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-From his first words, "WARNING: Everything you are about to read is true," readers know that they are in for a scathing look at television news. Kerbel deconstructs two-and-one-half hours of syndicated, local, and network information programming by analyzing an amalgam of news scripts from four of the largest U.S. media markets on a minute-by-minute basis. His tone is made clear in his Fundamental Rule of televison: "It is a pretend medium." Headlines for each news segment grab readers' attention. Kerbel gives readers a chance to put what they have read into practice by playing a game to create their own lead local story from a list of standard phrases. The author loves stock phrases, often referring to the "newswriter's bible, The Thesaurus of Clich‚s and Aphorisms." One of his favorites, "Please, use good judgment," allows weathercasters to make only slightly annoying weather conditions look dangerous, if not life threatening, to please their news directors and build their ratings. Kerbel drives home his points with a biting sense of humor. Students will look at the news with a new sophistication after reading this book.-Jane S. Drabkin, Chinn Park Regional Library, Prince William, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Kerbel, a former news writer for television and radio, provides a frank and cynical look at how television news and talk shows are produced and presented. He examines the common elements of attention-grabbing promos, the sensual and violent content, and the hyperkinetic hosts, anchors, and subjects. Kerbel takes a real-time look at two and a half hours of syndicated talk and news programming, pointing out that the formulaic approach of most shows allows people, places, and events to be easily plugged in and substituted, with little local flavor or thoughtful analysis. Kerbel compares the techniques used by Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake with those of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and local anchors as television news adopts a format similar to that of the talk shows. Kerbel uses material from actual broadcasts of national and local news and syndicated talk shows and provides cogent analysis of why and how the shows rely on brevity, simplicity, and shock value to entertain and inform. Vanessa Bush

Publishers Weekly
"[U]ncannily re-creates and simultaneously exposes superficial reporting, titillation and trivial distraction in television news."

Customer Reviews

Critics reconsider...
I can't figure out what the critics hated about this book. Kerbel makes a fascinating connection between popular TV (talk shows) and the news and follows up with incisive, often hilarious line-by-line dissection of the formulaic venality of editorial decisions governing what we see on TV news. Perhaps it is Kerbel's implied message that we viewers, and our baffling craving to be scared and misled, are to blame for the grotesque caricature that news-at-5 and -11 has become. TV, and its interrelated fact and fiction programming, is nothing more than the sum of we the viewers' flawed values, and this is Kerbel's unsettling message behind the humor. Buy it.

don't bother!
The best thing about this book was it's title. The rest is not worth the bother. It was redundant and, basically, just sarcastic drivel.

Enough Already
The author makes an interesting point, that is, that there is hardly a shade of difference between the manner in which the talk shows and the news programs market their product, that they both manipulate their audiences, and that their subjects are presented for impact, rather than content.

However, he makes this point in the first 15 to 20 pages, and he then makes it again, and again, and again, and again. I never thought such a short book could become so redundant and so boring. Good idea, bad delivery.