Can't Figure Out MSNBC

[Pogo]

MSNBC, FOX, CNN are not news outlets. They are propaganda sites that use entertainment as a sort of fake news hook.

I have noticed as these kind of sites grew in popularity the public became more and more uninformed and misinformed.

Rachel Maddow was great during the days of Air America. But since enjoying the big bucks on cable TV she's devolved to a Democratic establishment cheer leader.

All this bodes ill for the future of our country.

It's all News Theater now. Fox Noise started that. When Fox arrived CNN was the default anytime news source, doing actual news. But doing news is expensive. Requires flying people around, camera crews and satellite trucks, keeping foreign bureaus open, editors, all that stuff. Murdoch, who came from a tabloid rag mentality, figured he'd play down that part and make his money not with news reporters but with talking heads sitting around talking about the news -- which opens up the paramaters and lets you wander into commentary. That in turn lets you take sides and thus mine emotion... which is the dynamic that draws in viewers and keeps them there. "Coming up next we'll tell you who's out to kill you and why YOU should be afraid, but first this word for Viagra".

Attention of course is what sells ratings, which was what Murdoch was after. Ratings are irrelevant to content, but very relevant to how much profit you can make delivering eyeballs to an advertiser. Thus we get endless psychodramas about who-cares pablum like how Michael Jackson might have died and precious little on real actual usable information. An informed public is no match for the Almighty Dollar (praised be Its Holy Name).

The CNNs and MSNBCs then, to their discredit, followed suit and it all went down the sewer like rats following the pied piper. Even the Weather Channel spends its evenings not on what's going on right now but on pseudo-documentaries about somebody trapped in a car in a flood twelve years ago and how YOU could be impaled by a flying telephone pole if a hurricane were to get all the way to Dubuque.

Now that they are in the business of opinion making instead of information I wonder if the wedge issues like immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric are a creation of the corporate media. They give a soap box to the loudest pundits who are usually wrong.

Whether said talking head is 'right' or 'wrong' is immaterial. Their only concern is "will they $ell?"

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