If you were alive on December 7, 1941, you probably remember what you were doing and where you were. Ditto for November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001. If you don't know the significance of those dates, you can stop reading this column now and go back to your comic books and video games.

For those of you still reading, let me add another date—a date which will doubtless never appear in the history books or be remembered as a benchmark in the course of human events, but a date upon which something of singular significance took place within our culture.

The date was November 6, 2005. The time was 8-9 pm Eastern / 7-8 pm Central. It was during that time period that the weekly drama The West Wing aired an episode in which a Presidential debate took place. It was a debate between two fictional Presidential candidates: Matt Santos, portrayed by Jimmy Smits and Arnold Vinick, portrayed by Alan Alda. This was fiction. It was a show. It was an entertainment program, and yet right there in the lower right corner of the screen for all the world to see was the NBC News logo, and in the upper left corner of the screen was a graphic proclaiming LIVE.

Let me stop right here for a moment and make it clear that I understand that I may be the only person in Baltimore to have a problem with those graphics being used on an entertainment program, but make no mistake, I HAVE A BIG PROBLEM WITH THAT, and here's why.

Entertainment has always been a component in network news. The greatest news program ever produced is a complete failure if nobody watches it, and since the first day that the first commercial ran in the first sponsored newscast, the news has been for sale. That's a fact, and there's no getting around it, but for many years there was still a level of credibility that had to be maintained by the various news operations in order to continue to fly a program under the banner of NEWS. Every effort had to be made to insure that stories were accurate. For a reporter to use an anonymous source, he/she had to have at least two corroborating sources. You didn't go live from a hostage scene, and you didn't reveal the names of sexual assault victims. That was then, and this is now.

Now a rumor makes page one. Forged documents are used for a story on 60 Minutes. Dateline puts explosives in the back of cars to make sure they blow up on rear impact; and those rotten fish at Food Lion you saw on 20/20 a few years back, well, dag gone if 20/20 didn't help them get rotten before they shot their investigative piece.

One by one, the standards fell. The bar was lowered, and a once proud profession sank deeper and deeper into the slimy ooze of rumor mongering and over-hyping that is now part and parcel of every newscast in the country (WEATHER ALERT—IT MIGHT RAIN—WE'LL HAVE TEAM COVERAGE AT 11). But like an impoverished old woman who clings to her last good piece of jewelry, television news still had one niche that it filled very well—covering the big event.

CBS mounted it's first challenge to perennial network news leader NBC following its coverage of the Kennedy assassination, and Walter Cronkite became a star through that network's coverage of the space program. CNN was never a force until their coverage of Gulf War I brought them worldwide recognition as a credible and reliable source of live coverage. Ninety-nine days out of one hundred, television news might have been nothing more than audio-visual trash, but on that one day when the big event happened, television news could still be counted on because they could bring it to you live. You could see it. They told you it was live, so you could trust it. Until now.

Now (as of November 6, 2005 on The West Wing) you don't know any more, not for sure, because on that night NBC News, one of the oldest and proudest news gathering organizations in the world, told you that you were watching a live news event—and you were not. They took the last thing they had that still meant something, that graphic that says NBC News—LIVE, and they sold it. They hung it out there on an entertainment program, and in so doing they lied to you. They told you that you were watching a live news event, and you weren't. And now, like that impoverished old woman who finally breaks down and hocks her wedding ring, the sad fact is they have nothing left. They're no better than Entertainment Tonight.

John Buren

You can contact John Buren at johnburen13@hotmail.com.
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