(While Fox is, by far, the worst offender, this rant applies to all broadcast news stations.)The stars of the broadcast news media, for the most part, are no longer reporters. They are rabble rousers and trouble makers. They are gossips and job's comforters, and pains in the ass. They no longer give you an objective look at a story, so much as tell you how everyone else is looking at the story. This is designed to keep any incident in the news longer, make their jobs easier, and create the kind of dissension that is sure to result in more irrelevant news. They were busy reporting the insignificant birther story until the death of Bin Laden. Now they are discussing every detail of that operation ad infinitum, dragging in endless pundits to give their worthless opinions. Of course that doesn't stop them from still yapping about the birth certificate, reporting on some baseball's player's comments, interviewing the wildly insane Orly Taitz and keeping this irrelevant story going when it should have died a natural death last week. Now there will be endless reports on where Bin Laden was standing, how many people were killed, should he have been killed, was it legal, what color was the wallpaper, what did Bin Laden have for dinner earlier that night. In the meantime, much of America is flooded, thousands of people are homeless because or record tornadoes, and Japan's dire situation isn't even the main story any longer. And all the while that we get these repetitive and irrelevant stories, they are interrupted by an ever-increasing barrage of commercials and station promos for upcoming irrevelent storie and mindless virtual reality shows. What trouble me most is that nobody seems to be bothered by all this. I never heard anyone complain about the excessive commercials or the lack of intelligent programming. And if anyone thinks I'm overreacting and super-crankly about all this, nobody, except one friend (you know who you are) has even taken the trouble to comment that I am a pain in the ass on this subject.
I think the question of whether the bin Laden killing was legal (and I happen to think it was) is a fair one. Would that we could have some intelligent discourse on that... it might educate folks. But no, it's too easy to set up conversations and "debates" in which we end up demonizing and categorizing one another. What the cable and broadcast news folks should do is assemble a super-boring panel of experts on the Constitution and international law (i.e., none of the shouters whom viewers would recognize, but real and true eggheads), and let them have it out. I'd watch every second of that, and probably live-blog it, too. But alas, it'll never happen.
ReplyDeleteReasonable discourse! Are you mad, woman? Nobody knows how to do that. Everybody's bitching about the legality of killing Obama, but nobody was making a fuss when we were illegally tapping phones and torturing people. Yuck.
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