Review of the CBS 04/08/21 Evening Broadcast and its Informational Biases
CBS’s March 8th evening program, hosted by Norah O'Donnell, highlighted the four information biases described by Lance Bennett: dramatization, personalization, authority-disorder, and fragmentation. The program spanned a brief twenty minutes, yet managed to address ten stories, the first nine of which were related to violence, life-threatening weather disasters, and sexual misconduct.
The opening report was of a Texas shooting. While this shooting could have been used to address the dangers of widespread weapon distribution in the United States, this potentially educational example morphed into a sensationalized story. The story did not focus on alarming details of the victims’ injuries or wounds, the typical modus operandi of journalists seeking to shock and scare their audience, but nonetheless produced what Bennett describes as dramatization. He defines dramatization as the selection of highly shocking, sensationalized, or scandalous details of an event in order to create a narrative story. By focusing the viewer’s attention on the state-wide manhunt, a state trooper being shot, the shooter’s vague connection to the company where the shooting took place, and the involvement of the FBI in the case, O’Donnell imposed a narrative arc, complete with heroes and villains, and dramatic stakes that were playing out in real time.
At the center of the Texas shooting story was the ongoing fight for gun control within this country. While CBS’s broadcast compared the shooting to President Biden’s earlier speech on the need for gun regulation to demonstrate the pure irony of the situation, this was an example of Bennett’s personalization. Instead of reporting numerous accounts from different-minded politicians, the broadcast “personalized” the concept of gun regulation to make this grim topic more easily consumed by viewers. Intertwined within this segment's use of personalization is Bennett's idea of authority-disorder. Bennett describes a consequence of personalization to be the placement of blame on “specific political actors for social ills” (71). The broadcast reported that Biden was “frustrated by the frequency of mass shootings,” and that the realt fault lay with “Congress’s reluctance to discuss gun control.” By positioning these two statements against each other, the blame is posited upon Congress, and not our President. Similarly, an authority-disorder is also present: tension between Congress, an authority, and the unregulated consumption of guns by civilians—disorder—in our country. Such an informational bias usually results in praise or opposition to the authority, and hereby Congress is being rendered, as Bennett says, “incompetent.”
While the program reported on gun control as a potential solution to the frequency of school shootings in this country, this idea was ultimately brushed aside as a consequence of the dramatization of the shooting. By selecting certain shock-factors from the Texas shooting, O’Donnell subtly renders it an isolated incident and therefore not a societal one. Bennett calls this phenomenon fragmentation: the “capsuling,” or isolation of a story from its larger context or other related stories. The majority of the evening program’s stories also reflected the reality of gun violence, yet, by falling victim to personalization and dramatization, they too failed to frame its greater social context.
