all of my favorite missions were ill-defined

It seems my stays in Yaoundé always play themselves out against a background drone of looping headlines on international network TV. Today it is Euronews; less familiar to me than BBC World Service or Al Jazeera, but the same formula.

This probably isn’t news to many people, but I’ve just now been exposed to No Comment, and I am sold. For anyone who hasn’t seen this, or any other equivalent, No Comment is an approximately minute-long segment (or a couple of segments stuck together), consisting of breaking news footage with -you guessed it- no commentary.

No voice introduces or concludes, and nothing is written on the screen except time and place. The scene unfolds itself in silence leaving the viewer to, remarkably, interpret the events on their own. What I just watched was an antiwar demonstration in Munich, which turned violent in some relatively minor way. Or that is what I gather. It looked to me like in a peaceful, organized crowd of a few hundred demonstrating against Europe’s involvement with NATO, and a small handful of punchers, mostly a few police taking down a guy with a green Mohawk. I was enthralled.

This may just be me reacting to a novelty technique, but it seems reasonable that leaving people to think and conclude on their own will yield better thoughts and conclusions generally, in much the same way as removing all of the traffic signs and lanes on the roads lead to better driver awareness in that Dutch experiment that anarchists are so fond of citing.

Now that interesting and educated and commentary is free and prolific online, (most places) it may be that best service TV broadcasters can give to an audience is slick, high-resolution, first on the scene, professionally shot footage broadcast quick and wide. We interpret first and follow up on the facts later, if we care to. Could Show-Don’t-Tell reporting be the new big thing in TV journalism?

Unlikely; not all stories are suited to being told without words (how ever would we talk about climate change?), and of course if we remember our Chomsky, networks would not be doing their jobs if they let us do too much critical thinking.

Also, yes I know that filming and editing are subjective persuasive arts with or without narration, but there is such there are degrees of objectivity, and this new thing has less.

The link to no comment tv is here, although I do prefer thinking of it as a tube thing rather than an intertube thing.