- I have recently come to hate Wolf Blitzer's voice. I
didn't used to hate it, but now I do.
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- Before I came to hate Wolf Blitzer's voice the only TV
performer's voice I really hated was George Bush's.
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- I didn't hate George Bush's voice all the time. When
he read speeches crafted for him by Karen Hughes I hated what he was saying,
but not so much how he was saying it. That's because Karen Hughes is one
of the few speechwriters who could get him to utter words and phrases the
way people normally utter them in English--stopping briefly where the text
has a comma or semicolon and a little longer where it has a period.
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- When he's speaking without Karen Hughes's script, Bush
usually talks in four- or five-syllable bursts, with the caesurae coming
at points there is no reason for a pause. There is no link between phrase
and content, but he hits those dead stops and his eyes dart left and right
over that smug born-again grin as if there were. It drives me nuts, that
dissonance between George
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- Bush's content and phrases. Watching and listening to
unscripted Bush is like being the victim of some mad disco DJ who keeps
stopping the disk when everybody is still moving and then starts it again
before anybody has figured out where to go next. Neither Bush nor the mad
disco DJ give a damn where you are. It's all in terms of some inner beat
only they can hear, one that wouldn't make sense to you even if they told
you about it.
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- Wolf Blitzer's voice is a lot like that, only with him
it's the punch rather than the pause. Unlike Bush, Blitzer can utter an
unscripted and unrehearsed complex sentence. He can utter an unscripted
and unrehearsed paragraph. Wolf Blitzer is a very intelligent, informed
and articulate man.
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- But, when he's on camera, all of his sentences have the
same number of punches, no matter what the substance. Bush has irrelevant
silence; Blitzer has irrelevant punch. It's like they went to the same
elocution school but reversed the polarity.
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- Blitzer has the same velocity, the same hysteria, the
same triple stress in every phrase. If I were a musician scoring his voice,
the bars would be perfectly regular, the tempo allegro or presto, and I
would have at least one fortissimo notation in every single measure. Bam!
bam! bam! bam! bam!
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- Wolf Blitzer is not like that in conversation. In conversation
he's like you or me, with ordinary major and minor stresses, inflected
and uninflected syllables, and with phrases of varying duration. I've listened
to him take a few cell phone calls: there too, his voice is like anyone
else on a cell phone. The driving relentless voice is Wolf Blitzer's on-camera
television voice. That voice and velocity and stress pattern belongs to
his on-camera persona.
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- You're maybe thinking,"Well, Jackson, if you don't
like Wolf Blitzer's voice you don't have to turn on the tv." I hardly
ever turn on the tv. Most of the time I have the experience of Wolf Blitzer's
voice only when I go to the kitchen to get coffee or take a break from
working at my desk elsewhere in the house. My wife likes to work in the
kitchen. She is capable of sitting at the kitchen table and reading the
newspapers, grading exams, or getting ready for class while the tv is on.
I am incapable of ignoring the images and voices. When I come into that
kitchen from the other part of the house I hear the punch punch punch in
Wolf Blitzer's voice before I get close enough to make any sense at all
of his words. For Diane, I suppose it's like elevator music; for me it's
like somebody doing angry carpentry in the next apartment or someone working
with a pneumatic jack down the block..
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- I became aware of the newsreaders' punching technique
at the movies. William Hurt's character Tom Grunick tries unsuccessfully
to teach it to Albert Brooks' neurotic Aaron Altman in James L. Brook's
Broadcast News (1987).
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- "And try to punch one word or phrase in every sentence,"
Grunick tells his hapless friend. "Punch one idea a story. Punch!"
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- When he's on camera, Wolf Blitzer is punching all the
time. It matters not one iota what the story is. Sometimes the subject
deserves punching: major awful things are indeed happening out there, halfway
around the world, where the holy war, the terrible jihad of George Bush
and Donald Rumsfeld is being executed. But just as often the subject could
have been dealt with in an uninflected aside. It matters not: Wolf Blitzer
will fill the time segment with the same number of words, the same number
of punches, the same passionate intensity.
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- A humvee went off the road? a Huey went down killing
all aboard? bombs destroyed a market where civilians were shopping for
food? Rumsfeld and the generals say the war is going well? food and water
are being offloaded at Iraqi port? the Brits have something to say? It's
all punched exactly the same, it's all of equivalent value.
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- Cut for a few minutes to the commercials (a huge portion
which seem to be for garden or pharmaceutical products) or to the guy back
in CNN stateside HQ with a tabletop mockup of the war zone, a pointer,
and a general as his foil or respondent, or cut to Donald Rumsfeld at a
press conference doing his
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- Claude Rains imitation ("You ask me THAT? I'm shocked!
SHOCKED!?) and then cut back to Wolf Blitzer with those slightly-out-of-focus
Kuwait City minarets over his shoulder and it's as if the camera had never
cut away. No matter what the subject: bam! bam! bam! bam! bam!
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- While Blitzer's voice punches away, headlines of disasters
on the battlefield and elsewhere crawl telegraphically across the bottom
of the screen, along with the single constant in the CNN universe, the
phrase "CNN the most trusted name in news." It appears down there
in the telegraphic crawl, as if it were the same order of fact and deserved
the same kind of belief as the number of dead reported just before and
the number of bomber sorties flown against Baghdad reported just after.
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- And when there is no new news for a minute or so? Then
Blitzer asks the "CNN Web question of the day," which on Sunday
was, "What's the biggest threat to Coalition forces in Iraq? Friendly
fire? Weapons of mass destruction?" There was a third alternative
I didn't write down and forgot. In what world of sane journalism is such
a question subject to a vote by members of a television audience every
one of whom is ignorant of every fact at play? Why would "the most
trusted name in news" waste time pooling such ignorance, processing
it in its computers, making charts and graphs of the results? Why would
"the most trusted name in news" give currency to the idiotic
notion that people of good will can vote on facts?
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- Before we got any answers, there was another cut to commercials
for pharmaceuticals or garden products, after which Blitzer read questions
and emails from audience with exactly the same stresses, same velocity,
same im plication of significance he earlier reported battlefield casualties
and statements by presidents of nations and leaders of armies.
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- There is no difference, no discrimination. CNN is a world
of equal-opportunity information. Facts and pooled ignorance, off-the-wall
opinion, all are equal in the carnival of 24/7 reporting.
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- Anyone who has ever taken high school physics can recognize
what is going on. It's all about gas. A gas will always expand to fill
whatever container it occupies. Put the same amount of gas in a little
container and a big container and the gas will fill either. The only difference
is the distance between gas molecules and pressure in the container. The
gas couldn't care less. It has no shape, no form, no structural identity
of its own. The only shape comes from the container, the space available
to be filled.
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- Jim Lehrer, in his three- or four-minute summary at the
top of "Newshour" provides just about everything you might have
learned in a full day watching CNN or any of its less competent clones.
A few minutes spent reading the day's briefs on the Guardian's website will give you a wider range of
far more accurate information and a much wider range of informed opinion.
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- When I was carrying on about this a little while ago
in the kitchen, where the tv was on and Wolf Blitzer was talking about
something, Diane said, "You don't get it. For you, tv is information.
You're thinking the wrong generation. For Blitzer and CNN, it's entertainment.
CNN isn't news; it's entertainment. Get it?"
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- I got it, and she's right. This is war as entertainment,
as titillation. It's war as computer game, only it's more passive because
you don't even get to fondle the joystick. Facts don't matter except as
things with which to fill space between commercials. One fact is exactly
as good as another, one bit of videotape exactly as important as another.
CNN is a medium in which there is no difference between noise and information.
All that matters is that ever-changing eye-candy appears on the screen,
voices you cannot ignore are heard, and you're awake for the lawn product
and pharmaceutical commercials.
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- I hate Wolf Blitzer's voice not because of what he's
saying, but because everything he's saying is exactly the same, everything
has exactly the same value. All those things are not exactly the same and
they do not have exactly the same value. Some are awful, some are unspeakably
horrible, none is simple--and not one of the terrible facts in dispute
will be resolved or even clarified by a vote of the well-meaning ignorant.
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- Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel
P. Capen Professor of American Culture at University of Buffalo. He edits
Buffalo Report. His email address is bjackson@buffalo.edu.
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