Violence Is The News
By
Leonard Zwelling
It will not surprise readers of this blog to learn that, once again, it is the great Peggy Noonan who helped me sort out what has been eating at me for weeks in her piece in The Wall Street Journal on December 6.
I have been a watcher of the NBC Nightly News for several years. I thought that Lester Holt, the previous on-camera principal, was a serious journalist, trying to get the story right and always willing to go to the story anywhere in the world. Tom Llamas, Holt’s replacement, too seems serious. The newscast, unfortunately, seems not to be serious any longer.
The lead story is often weather. Weather is not national news. Let the local outlets handle that. Llamas also seems to be a fan of police chases, cars driving into high water, and bodily violence whenever it can be caught on a doorbell camera. Very little of this is news. It may be good television, but it is not news.
The other part of the news that is not news is occurring off the coasts of Venezuela. The United States Navy is performing target practice (violence) on defenseless motor boats that may or may not be carrying drugs. This is not news. It is, like local weather, “news porn.” It may be good television, but it is not news.
At the end of the news every night is a feel-good story that is usually about someone with a terminal illness who is being honored by the local football team or it could be a drunk raccoon passed out in the bathroom of a liquor store. This, too, is not news. It may be good television, but it is not news.
However, as Ms. Noonan outlines, the President of the United States calling women in the media all kinds of names is news. The tremendous uptick in political violence in the past year is news. The ever- growing gap between the haves and have nots in this country is news. The fact that health care costs for millions of Americans are about to explode and the Republicans have no plan to prevent it is news. And let’s not forget the rise of anti-Semitism. That’s news, too. Very little of this is reported on the NBC News—unless it contains violence. For a newscast of today, violence is news.
It was taught to me a long time ago, when I first began to appear on television for MD Anderson in the mid-1990s that “if it bleeds, it leads.” This is truer now than ever. It was also taught to me by my TV mentor Steve Stuyck that when it’s bad news, “get it out, get it all out, and get it out the first time.” Goodness knows, that has not been the case with the Jeffrey Epstein story which must be about how foreign governments paid him for dirt on prominent men who those governments considered enemies. The truth is still only dripping out.
There was a time when when the leaders of the media were who the country turned to for the truth (think Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite). When the three institutions of government were failing the people, the Fourth Estate would preserve the nation. That’s what Freedom of the Press is supposed to be about.
Instead, what we have now is:
- Newspaper stories that are poorly written, poorly researched, in terrible English, and do not follow the principles of journalism that I was taught to get the essence of the story in the first paragraph. And this includes pieces in The New York Times.
- Mainstream television broadcasts that do not carry real news and instead consider themselves entertainment. The PBS News Hour is still an exception.
- Cable news is just a series of echo chambers giving viewers more of what they already believe.
It is very hard to know where to get the news.
On that note I want to return to one story I wrote about above. It appears that the military has chosen or the President has ordered the destruction of speedboats in the Caribbean and Pacific off the coasts of Venezuela. For a deep dive into this story, listen to the December 4 episode of Fresh Air (below) with Alex Horton, a Washington Post reporter who broke the story of the Navy killing two survivors after the first strike on their boat left them shipwrecked in the water.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/03/nx-s1-5630324/did-the-trump-administration-commit-a-war-crime-in-its-attack-on-a-venezuelan-boat
We are not at war with Venezuela, at least not yet. Thus, these attacks are not acts of war. They are assassinations. They are murders. The justification of the assassinations is that the boats are carrying drugs that will kill Americans. If the boats from Venezuela are carrying drugs, they are not carrying fentanyl, which does kill Americans. But these boats are likely carrying cocaine, if they are even carrying drugs. Yet, Mr. Trump says he is after fentanyl. Mr. Trump has pardoned a convicted major cocaine kingpin and former Honduran president named Hernandez. Venezuela is not even close to being the major drug exporter to the U.S. Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico are bigger exporters.
This is a story that makes no sense. It cannot be news because it is of no consequence unless it leads to a war with Venezuela. And if that happens, why?
Many news outlets and members of Congress and talking heads on all sides of the political spectrum are spending hours of air time discussing whether or not the fact that the Navy killing two survivors of an attack on one of these boats is a war crime. This, too, is nonsense.
In fact, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that most broadcast and print news outside of sports is nonsense. Then, of course, we have the latest round of corruption in sports betting and fixed poker games and players purposefully throwing pitches in the dirt. Even sports are dishonest.
I am not sure how to best go about learning about the world. It’s way too big a place to limit yourself to what you can touch, hear, and see on your own. And yet, what else can you believe anymore?
As Harry Dean Stanton said, “I believe I’ll have another beer.”
2 thoughts on “Violence Is The News”
Try CNN
Nah. Just as biased, just a little less transparent. Lefties.