If It Bleeds, It Leads (A)

One of my dearest grad school professors came to academia from the news desk of an Alabama TV station.  She wrote her dissertation on the relationship between morbidity and ratings, observing a significant increase in the coverage of violent crime and trauma during the ratings sweeps of February and November.  TV ad rates for the rest of the year are determined by the audience measurement snapshots taken during these periods. 

The pressure on local news programs is enormous.  Their ads typically account for more local revenue than any other programs a station carries.  Thus, low ratings frequently motivate personnel changes.  Anchors, reporters, news directors — they all live and die by the ratings book.  So the connection of ratings and revenue to the “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” headline is intensely personal.  You want to keep your job?  Deliver eyeballs.  Make people watch.

   
The obvious danger is expressed in a question: what will people do to keep their jobs?  What ethical corners might they cut?  Jake Gyllenhaal’s new movie Nightcrawler offers some unsavory — some might say psychopathic — answers.

   
Gyllenhaal’s eerie Louis Bloom stumbles into a career as an ambulance-chasing videographer.  Increasingly unscrupulous, he elbows out other mercenaries competing to provide exclusive, “first-on-the-scene” footage of fires, collisions, and killings.

   
News director Rene Russo offers him candidly damning advice.  She’ll pay more for videos which depict the creep of violent crime toward L.A.’s white, affluent suburbs.  Such footage inspires fear in viewers.  And people in fear watch the news.  At 6 in the morning.  Again in the evening.  Fearful people sign up for alert texts and e-mails.  Have there been any developments?  Have cops run the bad guys to ground?  Is the fire creeping toward my neighborhood?

   

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler

Bloom risks big to win big.  He executes a chillingly calculated plan for besting his rivals, not really weighing the consequences of his reportage.  By the time the ethics alarm sounds, Bloom’s hook is in too deep.  He has ingratiated himself as an indispensable news gathering professional. 

   
Many essayists lament the slant of news in service of political agendas.  Nightcrawler and Gyllenhaal’s career-defining performance reminds us of an equal or greater threat.  Ratings fever, simple popularity — in short, raw democracy — prioritizes the worth of human lives.  It is true on American Idol.  It is true on the evening news.  It has been true of the drug war for decades:  Afghani farmers will stop growing poppies when Americans stop buying heroin.