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Both Fox & MSNBC are a blight on what used to be known as "the news".
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what used to be known as the news is when all the major networks were carbon copies of MSNBC - Left Wing Liberal Vomit- Fox has changed all that
Got news for ya Madge. What MSNBC is doing is imitating Fox Noise.
News used to be news: dry, unemotional facts, who-what-where-when and get out. Along came CNN to bring a steady feed of it to TV. Then Rupert Murdoch shows up, fresh from a career making a fortune on sleazy tabloid rags, with a whole new idea: instead of doing actual news, which is expensive, flying people around, keeping news bureaus open around the world, etc, Fox would present News Theater: talking heads in a studio talking
about the news, rather than actually covering it.
Oh, they keep token stringers stringing along to employ a camera crew when something blows up, but where they make their money is prime time -- and prime time is a garishly colored studio populated by angry white guys pounding on tables and short-skirted bimbos all murmuring endless commentary not about what the news
IS but what the news
means. Not about politics (the process) but about politic
ians (the persons). Basically the sleazy tabloid applied to TV news: a gossip channel oozing endless salacious scandal, starring the political party of the booga-booga man as the evil villain. Real news has no evil villains; it just
is.
And of course that meaning is always polarized into an "us vs. them" mentality of good guys and bad guys in a grand fake morality play that is indistinguishable from that of WWE wrestling. Which also generates loyalty and an
emotional relationship with a news channel such as is exhibited here daily. When news was news, nobody cared if the CBS station went down; you just tuned to ABC and got the same news. In Fox Noise you have an
emotional investment. That's very different, and that's also very lucrative. Nobody ever made money presenting news. But News
Theater, ah yes, there's gold in them thar ills. Because you get viewers emotionally invested.
Poor CNN, back there still doing news, found its ratings foundering with the siphoning of its more gullible audience segment, because as H.L. Mencken astutely put it, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public". And Fox Noise was definitely not going broke by polarizing the news. Too, CNN's expenses were a lot higher since it was still doing real news with real reporters and real foreign bureaus. But advertising pays the bills, and without the ratings the income started to suffer (CNN was built by thinking big, and it's got a massive infrastructure to maintain). So, to its discredit CNN and its masturbatory offshoot HLN took a page from the Fox playbook and got down into the same gutter. Or it tried to. It's still trying to figure out how to straddle that fence today.
MSNBC did the same thing, though it didn't have a legacy of actual news to abandon. It's basically the mirror image of Fox Noise, doing the same thing from the perspective of the other side. The guys in the white and black hats switch and the same game goes on. Same game, different channel.
None of it is "news". But make no mistake about where it
started. K? This pipe dream sales pitch about how the "news used to be liberal with Walter Cronkite screaming blah blah" (which oddly, no one articulated at the time) is just more revisionist history to try to validate what is nothing more than News Theater, a sleazy gossip channel -- a version of Entertainment Tonight using politicians instead of movie stars. And of course, Fear, the number one selling brand of emotion.
Because when you're in the business of
selling rather than
telling the news, emotion is your lifeblood.
you're a genius
