Feedback November 2002 (Vol 43 No 4)

COMMENTYO, YO, YO! THIS IS THE HIP-HOP CNNTimothy D. Pollard, Ball State Universitytpollard@bsu.eduThe following originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, October 9, 2002. Reprinted withpermission.There is one holy grail in advertising: the 18-to-49-year-old market. This demographicis responsible for the bulk of advertising purchases on television these days. If you donot have this group, you are considered old-fashioned and out of touch with today’ship culture.To reach this audience, CNN Headline News has adopted a list of terms from“hip-hop” language for use by anchors, in the “crawl” (the news strip that runs at thebottom of the television screen), and in graphics. On this list are words such asbling-bling (“jewelry”), flava (“style”), fly (an older term meaning “attractive”) andfreak (“dance provocatively” or “have sex”).With advertising budgets stretched thin by more and more “niche” televisionchannels on satellite or cable, networks have to refine their missions. The theory is thathip-hop lingo will influence younger audiences to view CNN Headline News and notthe other news networks. In fact, CNN Headline News has beaten MSNBC in the key18-to-49-year-old group for the past two months.Two questions: Is CNN Headline News pandering to get this age group, or is itsimply ahead of the curve? And will the other news networks follow suit?The question of using current vernacular to replace standard English has beendebated for years. Is it OK to use language common to a certain group to get the storyacross, or is it pandering to the lowest common denominator? If the bottom line is toget people to watch your station or network, then you need to find a way to attractviewers. In an increasingly crowded market, where broad-based networks are losingaudience share to niche networks, the thinking goes that segmenting an audience, andgoing after that audience, is the way to go.The biggest question is whether young people, who are used to talking in streetlanguage, will be attracted to news shows if their language is used on the air. Willgetting a young audience to watch the news and learn about the world make thoseviewers more fluent in the world, less ignorant than many of us old coots think theyare?Those who take the opposing view will see the hip-hoppification of CNN HeadlineNews as pandering. The responsibility of a news organization, they argue, is not tobring street language to the business—it’s to present the news in a traditional way,using broadly accessible, standard language that allows the audience to make up its own66Feedback November 2002 (Vol. 43, No. 4)