* = closing line from a local news broadcast from Providence, RI. The anchor said this just before cutting to footage of a horse swimming in a pool, which ran for 2-3 seconds before the commercial break.

When I was in São Paulo last week, one of the TV stations I got in my hotel room was CNN’s international service.  I’m not sure if this was CNN International under a new guise, or some other version of the network directed at international audiences.  Regardless, what disturbed me was first, the idea that CNN would present two different newscasts under the same name (“CNN”) with no mention of them differing from one another, and second, just how much smarter the version aimed at non-Americans seemed to be.  Instead of snarky tidbits and frothy lifestyle stories presented by former runway models, this international version of CNN featured long-format round-table discussions about the situation in Iran, and an entire show devoted to global press coverage.  And best of all, Lou Dobbs was nowhere to be seen.  After watching this CNN for a few minutes, I felt like I had actually learned something.

Now granted, I didn’t watch for nearly long enough in that São Paulo hotel room to determine whether CNN for foreigners is consistently more substantive than its domestic cousin.  But assuming my intuition was more or less correct, it’s depressing – though it probably shouldn’t be surprising – that CNN would disguise two different broadcasts as the same thing, and consciously dumb down the version it presents to its U.S. viewers.  While it’s tempting to speculate that CNN might do this because, frankly, Americans are idiots and/or don’t like to be intellectually challenged, that’s not accurate.  Granted, many Americans don’t like to be intellectually challenged, and some people (Americans and otherwise) just don’t care about the news and never will.

Still, I refuse to believe that a disinterest in “hard” news is an a priori part of the American personality.  If the best of NPR and the New York Times were the journalistic norm in the U.S. as opposed to the gold standard, then maybe the average American media consumer would be more demanding?  If, day in and day out, you feed people saccharine mush like stories about prisoners raising puppies for war veterans (cnn.com linked to this story a couple of days ago), don’t be surprised if they have a Beavis and Butthead-style reaction to coverage that demands a bit more of them: “huh, huh…she [Christiane Amanpour] talks funny…”

It’s always tempting to attribute broad social patterns, particularly when they depress us, to “essential” flaws– this is the problem with the movie Idiocracy, and with a lot of failed satire.  But that kind of explanation is both inaccurate and too easy.  The truth, I think, is more complex.  I don’t have a sense for exactly what’s going on, but I imagine it has to do with a toxic combination of a profit-hungry and rapidly consolidating media marketplace dominated by fewer and fewer conglomerates, and an anti-intellectual educational a cultural climate that puts a premium on results (“news you can use”) and presents intellectual curiosity pure and simple as self-indulgent and pretentious – the sort of thing that phantasmagorical boogeyman, “the French” (not to be confused with actual French men and women), would indulge in.

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