If It Bleeds, It Leads: An Anatomy of Television News

By Matthew Robert Kerbel

Book Overview

You've been watching television news forever. You're intimately familiar with the friendly faces and soothing voices that nightly tell you what's wrong with the world. You think you know everything there is to know about them. You're wrong.If It Bleeds, It Leads takes us minute-by-minute through two-and-one-half real hours of syndicated, local, and network information programming to uncover the truth behind what passes as news. Why is the only real difference between Jerry Springer and Dan Rather that Dan's guests usually don't need medical attention? How did a load of baking powder spark two minutes of high-strung local news coverage? It's all here: the personal revelations of talk show guests; the dangers lurking in your neighborhood; sports; sex; celebrity; power; and weather updates every ten minutes--all real material taken from real broadcasts designed to keep viewers glued to the screen.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813398193
• ISBN13: 9780813398198
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Critics reconsider...

I can't figure out what the critics hated about this book. Kerbel makes a fascinating connection between popular TV (talk shows) and the news and follows up with incisive, often hilarious line-by-line dissection of the formulaic venality of editorial decisions governing what we see on TV news. Perhaps it is Kerbel's implied message that we viewers, and our baffling craving to be scared and misled, are to blame for the grotesque caricature that news-at-5 and -11 has become. TV, and its interrelated fact and fiction programming, is nothing more than the sum of we the viewers' flawed values, and this is Kerbel's unsettling message behind the humor. Buy it.

It Leads to Brilliance

Matthew Kerbal gets it right every step of the way. By merely stating the obvious Kerbal makes us all aware of the dementia running through telelvision's need to please and worse, to fill too much air time. Staying out of the way, Kerbal brilliantly illuminates the uselessnes of TV News and with a great sense of humor he brings out the stranger-than-fiction aspects of American society. Bravo. A truly excellent read.

How true! If it bleeds it does lead.

The night before I read this hilarious book the lead story on my local news was a "this just in" double murder with on the spot reactions that could have come right out of the book. The thesis of the book is that TV news, both local and network, is dominated by formulae almost identical to those that govern talk shows like Springer. Kerbel substantiates his thesis via a running, and very funny, commentary on real news broadcasts from around the country. He also shows how the actual content of the news - the fearful, the bizarre, the outrageous and, of course, sex - stays the same while the putative actual subjects change from day to day. Is this depressing? Beats me, I just watch for the weather and sports(and he has some funny things to say about that too). If you want a good send up of the media this is for you.