What do you think about News programming in general?

[ShadowBoxing]

News is not really the news. It's a TV show like any other TV show. Some shows like "Face the Nation" and "60 minutes" are good. But like anything else it is about ratings and getting you to watch. Whether it is scaring the crap out of you, or just giving you good old "Man bites dog stories" with a helping of violence and sex crimes...its no different that pitching a TV show.

They go through sweeps and try to garner demographics like anyone else ever since the OJ trail revealed that yes, people will watch for entertainment value.

Even Colbert and Stewart do the same crap, albeit in a more insightful and stylized fashion. For every critcism they float over on Bush or Rumsfeld they give a lot of the other groups free passes and tend to skip over really searching or probing the issue (it is a half hour though so)

And that is another problem. TV news takes away the ability to really explore how complex issues are. Because if there is a race riot the best you can really come up with in the three hours after it occurred is to stick some black guy and some white conservative suit on TV to duke it out.

And they really also already have the story figured out as well. They have to if they want you to watch. They just attempt to fill in the gaps with today's events. If the President is bad (like Comedy Central tends to favor) then they will find all the bad things he does and present them. FOX news obviously does the opposite. Hardly anyone does both at once.

Print news and articles are the way to go. NYTimes only has to worry about putting attention grabbers on the first three pages and then whatever goes in the sports section. The rest is good ol' journalism.

 

[Alpha and Omega]

Interesting points.

I will say this in favor of one person: Tucker Carlson (MSNBC anchor who's decent, even though I don't agree w/ every thing that he says) usually tries to view the issue as objectively as possible. The fact that he makes an attempt is admirable in today's media.

One thing that kind of bothers me is the name association w/ the news though. Although people like the late Walter Cronkite were reputable figures in news, I've always thought that the story should take precedence over who's reporting it. Lately, the main thing you see are networks doing plugs for their meteorologist, their anchors, or their sports team. The shameless enticements of some network telling me to join their family and um, watch them all the time, is kind of pathetic imo.

I understand why networks want people to have a 1st name basis w/ their anchors; this lulls the average viewer into the sense that they're familiar w/ said individual. It's bs because we don't know these people personally, but it apparently works, since we each probably can mention 1 or 2 that we respect. (Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings)

Honestly, I'm starting to think that Sportscenter has the most objective news coverage on TV. I never thought I would say that, but they stick to the story and rarely speculate or exaggerate.