That's because they're not. They're trying to adopt the successful Murdoch business model to spread the left wing gospel just as FAUX is trying to spread the right wing gospel. They're already there with Rachel Madcow leading the charge.
That's true, although Maddow at least stays factual and talks to the opposition but yes, they and CNN have both lowered to the same level of selling emotion. Lawrence O'Donnell with his contrived outrage may be the worst, although I can't sit through 30 seconds of Al Sharpton so I dunno, that comparison might be incomplete.
So why are MSNBC doing that? Obviously not reaching for journalistic integrity; Sharpton brought in a considerable black audience which accounts for some of their ratings improvements, and just like Fox, having hair-on-fire talking heads telling the prepartisaned viewer what he/she wants to hear builds loyalty. That's a business model and not a journalism model.
This goes back to Grandpa's illusions about what "succeeds" on TV. Journalistic integrity and ratings "success" have nothing to do with each other except to be mutually antagonistic. Programing quality doesn't sell; ideology doesn't sell; journalistic ethics don't sell --
the emotion of drama and conflict is what sells. Genuine news is dispassionate and disinterested; cold, raw unemotional fact that takes no side. When you see a talking head start yelling or using value judgement terms, trying to stir the audience into one conclusion or another, you know you've left the world of news and entered the News Circus.
Bluntly, there is no profit in straight balanced news. There's a stark choice between two poles: if straight balanced news is what you're interested in, you just do it and forget the ratings, because they're not coming. But
if ratings are what you're interested in, then you bring out the news circus clowns and to hell with journalistic standards. This latter has become the modern model. We are here.
Fox Noise invented the circus, and seeing how much money NewsCorp was making at it, the others, being also huge multinational corporations, follow it down the hole. None of them are there for news. They're there to sell circus.
Because that's where the money is. Bottom line, NewsCorp and NBC and Time Warner are
a lot more alike than the puppets they put on TV.
Why do they keep selling that? Because we keep buying it. As long as they do, they might as well call them Fox News Circus, MSClownBC and ClownNN.
Good post Grampa M.
Not quite as bad as Ubango BRAINWASHING his followers. At least at fox we have a choice of what to watch. With Ubango you watch and believe or your out.
