Stressing feelings over facts shortchanges viewers

Preference, please:

Fact or feeling? Knowledge or sensation? Explanation or emotion?

Ideally, much of the former is laced with a little of the latter. Reversing the ratio, TV news sometimes favors appealing to the gut over enlightening the brain.

Empathy as the star of the story -- obscuring genuine information -- was evident locally last week when the U.S. Senate voted down a proposed jobs bill, nixing extension of unemployment benefits.

Whatever your ideological stripe, level of outrage or even employment status, let's look dispassionately at what news you actually got from KLAS-TV, Channel 8's 11 p.m. lead piece.

Localizing the story, given that Nevada has the nation's highest unemployment rate at 14 percent, reporter Jonathan Martinez found and interviewed jobless Nevadans. The news? They were upset.

Flabbergasted? KO'd by the proverbial feather? Maybe the news wasn't that they were upset. It's that they were really upset. ... And that's it.

Reactions are standard story elements -- but should they be all of the story?

We felt for them. How could we not? (Especially given a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-us factor.) But we were only asked to feel. We weren't asked to think. We weren't provided relevant information to process -- say, knowing the reasons Republicans torpedoed the bill that might help us make informed choices about whether to return them to D.C. come November for more congressional high jinks, or forcibly retire them.

We got the "what." We even got "what the hell?" We just didn't get the "why."

On a 5 p.m. KVVU-TV, Channel 5 newscast, doing without any interviews with unemployed locals to provoke the desired emotion, co-anchor Olivia Fierro read the bill story with a dejected voice and glum face -- but nothing about the actual thinking behind its sinking.

Dismissing the reasons behind the vote as self-evident because the Republicans are "the party of no" might be a Democratic talking point, but it shouldn't wind up the default assumption viewers take from news outfits, whose failure to further explain -- beyond "Republicans defeated it" -- could be construed as tacit endorsement of that partisan trope.

Officially, as reported by the R-J's Steve Tetreault: "Republicans complained that not all new spending was offset with budget cuts elsewhere and so would deepen the budget deficit by $33 billion. They proposed to pay for the package with unspent stimulus money but that was rejected by Democrats."

Quoting Sen. John Ensign: "I know that many (Nevadans) are worried about losing their benefits, but we have to pass legislation that will pay for the benefit extension now instead of later."

That attempted justification, whether it placates or incites you, shouldn't go MIA. That the vote nearly split down party lines might not shock, but doesn't negate the need to explain how those lines are drawn. Public debate requires details more than drama. Empathy shouldn't come at the cost of information.

Granted, these stories were selected randomly from hours of newscasts. Not all of that day's reports on the vote might be characterized the same way. Yet for viewers at those moments?

News you can use lost to news that lights your fuse.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.