Even written reports that have time to get it right sometimes don't. A WCBS report on the Bush administration's response to revelations that it approved torture refers to the release of documents that "are intended to counter a growing perception the Administration authorized torture as an interrogation technique." That is not a perception, but a fact. On the same day, New York's WABC got it right, reporting of one of the documents, "In another, Bush claims the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties."

And then there is a general squeamishness when it comes to sex or profanity, which can result in some bizarre meanings. Anchor Bill Stuart of KCNC in Denver reports on a serial killer who has confessed to murdering five "prostitutes," and notes that the suspect may be linked to the death of two "women" in Phoenix. Maybe the women in Phoenix were not prostitutes -- does Stuart mean that the prostitutes in Colorado weren't women? Yes, prostitutes can put themselves in dangerous positions. But Stuart's description of the Colorado victims has a "Well, what do you expect?" quality that implies the murders were predictable, if still regrettable.

The same station reports that Colorado University president Betsy Hoffman, in a deposition investigating alleged rape by members of the university's football team, is asked if she thinks the word "cunt" is degrading. She answered yes. But, a medieval scholar, Hoffman is reported to have added, "in some contexts, it could be used as a term of endearment, such as Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales,' an epic poem written in the 14th century." Forget the condescension of finding it necessary to tell viewers what "The Canterbury Tales" is; the real condescension here is watching adults talk to other adults using the phrase "the C-word." This isn't just an area where TV news is to blame. The same namby-pamby approach rules in newspapers. I had to read three stories in the New York Times before I could piece together what Dick Cheney said to Patrick Leahy. And I still don't know whether it was a verb ("fuck yourself") or a compound verb ("go fuck yourself").

Maybe it's silly to expect "cunt" to be bandied around on a 4 p.m. newscast, but there's nothing to keep the station from warning people that the following story contains strong language. The question here is do journalists have a duty to keep us informed about what officials say or not? Most news isn't fit for the ears of decent people -- what difference does a cunt or two make? The Colorado report recalled the mid-'70s when Gerald Ford's Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz was reported by the press to have said that all black people wanted was "comfortable shoes, good sex and a warm place to go to the bathroom." Doesn't quite have the same impact as "loose shoes, tight pussy and a warm place to shit," which is what Butz actually said.

There was something about that silly, childish report in Colorado that epitomized the whole sorry state of local TV news, where euphemism seems the natural mode of expression. Apart from some extended footage from the same CBS Denver affiliate tracking the progress of funnel clouds touching down in the area -- a story that could not be shaped or spun because it was being covered as it was happening -- nearly everything I watched gave off a sense of unreality. The imprecision of language just came to seem the most obvious aspect of broadcasting that implied what we saw and heard was a managed spectacle, a tidied-up representation of real events.

Record covers used to come with small-print instructions along the spine: "File under easy listening" or "File under pop/rock: The Beatles" and so on. Almost every story I watched on every local news station felt as though it had come to the anchors and reporters with similar instructions. Each story was categorized and predigested before it was presented to viewers -- all ambiguity and uncertainty was removed. Caterina Bandini at WHDH Boston introducing a story with "The commission investigating the 9/11 attacks shared with the nation today what it has learned about the original plans [dramatic pause] and the details are chilling," doesn't feel like someone telling you that al-Qaida wanted to fly planes into nuclear power plants and locations on the West Coast. She sounded as if she was making a pitch for a miniseries you'd never want to watch. Instead of trying to give credence to the unthinkable, she's content to treat it as if it were unthinkable, and thus impossible.

The standard bleat about television news is that it has become entertainment, and that the audience is too inured by exposure to the media to know the difference between entertainment and reality anyway (a snob's argument that depends on viewing most people as morons). It seems much more insidious than that. Anchors and reporters seem like the ones with no sense of the reality of the events they talk about. They don't try to communicate the meanings and consequences of the stories they report. Instead they try to make them recognizable as things that have happened before -- Accident Takes Innocent Lives; Trouble in the Middle East; Crime Shocks Quiet Neighborhood -- and will happen again.

For years movies and TV shows dramatized breaking news stories with shots of newspapers spinning toward the camera and stopping to reveal screaming headlines in block print. After that there'd be a cut to a capped newsboy crying "Extry! Extry!" as people crowded in to get a copy of the latest edition for themselves. The 24-hour news cycle and its chief henchmen, cable TV and the Web, have obliterated that sense of urgency. Or rather, since that sense of urgency is now the norm, they have made it irrelevant. If everything is dire, then nothing is, and the overall effect is to make reality itself unreal. At no point in what I watched did anyone manage to make the dots come alive, at no point was anyone on-screen able to talk like a human being and say, "This is really happening."

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