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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us March 2, 2006 Former CNN news Anchor Aaron Brown addresses an audience at Southern Oregon University prior to his keynote speech at the First Amendment Forum. Orville Hector | Ashland Daily Tidings Brown: Viewers vote with remotes By Robert Plain Ashland Daily Tidings Television news is often vilified in Ashland, and Wednesday night’s annual First Amendment Forum at Southern Oregon University was no exception. This year’s theme was “Is television news fulfilling its promise?” and many came to grill the panel of local broadcast professionals and former CNN anchor Aaron Brown about whether or not they are doing so. But Brown, the keynote speaker of the event, told the audience of approximately 250 not to blame those doing the broadcasting, because they are only giving their viewers what they are asking for. Related story Brown not looking to jump back in “Television news is the perfect — and I mean perfect — democracy,” Brown, who was CNN’s prime time anchor for five years before being let go in November. “The audience votes with their remote controls. You sit there and vote, hundreds of times per hour.” Brown has been critical of cable news’ mission since leaving CNN. He told the audience when he reported on the war in Bosnia, viewers changed the channel. When he tried to educate his audience on the financial problems with the American auto industry, the same thing happened. Conversely, when he would report on Laci Peterson, a woman murdered by her husband, CNN’s viewership rose. The same happened when news outlets reported on Natalee Holloway, a young woman who was abducted in Aruba. In fact, he said, Holloway did him in at CNN in a way, because when his network put a heavy emphasis on covering the tsunami in the south Pacific, FOX News went heavy on Holloway. Because Fox’s ratings did so much better, he feels CNN decided to move its coverage in that direction and, thus, decided to let him go. “Did you want to know more about the war in Iraq?” he asked the audience. “Well I wanted to report on it. But Natalee Holloway kicked my butt.” Brown said at CNN he tried to offer his viewers “a balanced diet” of news. “Healthy but tasty,” he said. But whenever he got around to reporting on what he called the Brussels sprouts, meaning the nutrition news viewers needed to make informed decisions, they would change the channel. “Cable news is too often just like mud wrestling,” he said. “Why? Because you actually find it entertaining ... and then you blame me for it. If you want serious news, watch it. In the perfect democracy that TV is, you will get exactly what you want.” After his address, Brown was joined on the stage by three representatives of the local television news outlets: KDRV Channel 12, KOBI Channel 5 and KTVL Channel 10. They each said they, too, would like to broadcast what the people need to know but have a commercial obligation to serve the audience what they want. “What we do is try to make sure there is a mixture of what you need to know and what you want to know,” Geoffrey Riley, representing KDRV, said. But his colleague, Gordon Godfrey of Channel 10, said regardless of what kind of news they present, the majority of the viewer responses concern the attire and hair style of the newscasters. Ralph Temple, a local activist for independent media, chastised Brown for being a part of the corporate takeover of the news business. He said the “corporate news perspective” has contributed to less information relevant to the middle class. But Brown said it’s consumer interests, not corporate interests, that dictate what gets aired. “The news is a business that needs people to watch,” he said. A woman asked him, “How do we create a populace that wants to know about Abu Ghraib?” To which Brown said, “I’m not sure that, in may respects, we don’t have that. If you watch the evening newscasts, it’s there.” But he did hedge his answer somewhat adding, “TV news is a child of the entertainment business. It’s not that Walter Cronkite started and ‘I Love Lucy’ followed. It happened the other way around.” SOU Assistant Provost Paul Steinle, one of the organizers of the forum, kicked off the evening with a bit of ironic information. Earlier in the day, according to Steinle, the Associated Press reported that Americans know more about the Simpsons, a cartoon sitcom family, than they do about the First Amendment. Staff writer Robert Plain can be reached at 482-3456 x 226 or [email protected]. 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