"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Why does anyone watch CNN, or even MSNBC? (I know why some people, such as my 80+yr-old mum, watch Fux. Because they're fossils whose brains stopped working in the mid-1990s.) The former two are NOT news channels. They're opinionblather, psychological programming for what TPTB WANT Americans to think. "Become excited about the latest hyped controversy! Both sides are just craaaaaaazy!"
Meanwhile, there's shit-tonnes of REAL news from all over the planet and inside the United Shoots of Amassacre that are ignored. Because that would take real work, like having news crews being paid to go to distant regions (like rural Ohio where the fentanyl epidemic is killing people), producers editing the footage, etc. Cheaper and easier to have a few blowhards sitting around a table talking over each other. Anyone who depends on the cable "news" networks for their understanding of the world is a damned fool. I mean that in several senses of the phrase.
The last time I heard CNN for any extended period of time was in early 2017. I was eating dinner with my daughter at a funky Southern Maryland soul food restaurant that's been around since the days of segregation. It's run by old-school African Americans, so they loyally had the TV tuned to CNN, the Party channel of the polite left wing. Better than Fux at a truck stop! Some bloviator, maybe Michael Smerconish, possibly Don Lemon, was doing his yap show, ranting about Trumpinidiot, the orange Black Hole who sucks all the oxygen out of every room. Even though I agreed with what Smerc/Lem was saying, after about five minutes I wanted to scream "Shut this fucking thing off! Play some NEWS, goddamit! I'm sick of opinions when I want to hear facts!" I kept my yap shut, because it was not my turf, and concentrated on talking to my kid. MSNBC, even Rachel Maddow, is just as maddening to me.
It's possible to have a real 24-hour news network. Government-run ones are great. Down Undahere, the ABC ("A" standing for Australian) is paid for by the government, and it actually covers news events that happen around the country and across the world. There are opinion-talk shows, with cons as well as lefties, but 85% of the time it's straight news, a bit repetitious because they operate on a half-hour cycle, but mostly factual information. There's another government-run channel, SBS, that focuses more on international news, including running hour-long rebroadcasts of various countries' news programmes in their native language. Greek, Filipino, Iranian, Polish... The U.S. is represented by the PBS news Hour, which is like viewing a bowl of oatmeal. When I lived in Vancouver, the government-run CBC was another great source of by-the-book, straight-down-the-middle news. (Especially in contrast to the Canadian commercial news channels, which were Amerikan-level drecky.)
I haven't owned a telly (intentionally so) since December 2012, when I let my departing (now-ex) wife take it with her when she decamped to San Francisco. We used to have it tuned to MSNBC like background aural wallpaper, but I paid more attention to the Chyron news crawl than I did the voices. I get glimpses of local TV on the various hospital wards where I work. Much of it seems almost as weird as the psychiatric patients. I try to analyse the tube the same way I do the crazyppl: not so much the direct wording of the delusional content they're voicing, but what is the underlying message? Agitation? Paranoia? Depression? Suicidal intent? One thing's for sure -- like the mentally ill, television (including CNN) is a distorted, funhouse-mirror reflection of what's happening in the Newtonian Physics world of reality.
Because I had read a couple of his books and more or less enjoyed them, I used to occasionally catch Fareed Zakaria's Sunday morning show, until it became clear that it was just another generic "panel" show, three bland centrists and one contentious asshole, the usual nonsense. Aside from that, CNN was only good for watching Anthony Bourdain's show, and even that was as much commercials as content.
I do sometimes have MSNBC on as background noise late at night, if there's nothing on HBO. Mostly it's more of the same. I agree that televised news in the US is barely entertainment, and certainly not news. It is useful only for getting the local weather forecast -- usually.
Unfortunately, as we all know, television and social media are how an increasingly large proportion of 'murkins get the "facts" with which they assess the world and make their decisions accordingly. So it can't be completely ignored, as much as we'd like.
I try to analyse the tube the same way I do the crazyppl: not so much the direct wording of the delusional content they're voicing, but what is the underlying message? Agitation? Paranoia? Depression? Suicidal intent?
Yes, this. Obviously this wondrous new century has set whatever legit news industry we once had on its collective side, and they've scrambled for years to keep up with the tectonic changes. Trump's candidacy and the daily drama of its players pointed a clear path for them -- fear, chaos, discord, and impending doom.
I've mentioned before the scene from the Howard Stern autobio movie Private Parts, where early on the radio station is tracking Howard's listenership. The survey respondents who said they loved Stern listened for an average of 1½ hours, but the people who said they hated him said they listened for 2½ hours. I think there is a similar collective phenomenon going on with Trump. It's the car wreck you can't look away from -- all day, every day. Keep 'em agitated and they keep tuning in.
I haven't been overseas in a very long time, unfortunately, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that the media companies, state-owned and private, do not have constantly churning 24-hour news cycles either. Americans have been kept in a state of perpetual agitation by decades of this.
And who pioneered the 24-hour news cycle? That's right, CNN.
Really, it seems that the teevee news is now just a loss-leader to push audience segments into other parts of the vertically integrated news borg in order to lob contents into the virtual abyss. Only the olds watch teevee anymore anyway, and the revenue model there is predicated on viewers buying the sponsors' products. But if you can push them over to the website or YouTube, you get paid by the click/view rate.
Why does anyone watch CNN, or even MSNBC? (I know why some people, such as my 80+yr-old mum, watch Fux. Because they're fossils whose brains stopped working in the mid-1990s.) The former two are NOT news channels. They're opinionblather, psychological programming for what TPTB WANT Americans to think. "Become excited about the latest hyped controversy! Both sides are just craaaaaaazy!"
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, there's shit-tonnes of REAL news from all over the planet and inside the United Shoots of Amassacre that are ignored. Because that would take real work, like having news crews being paid to go to distant regions (like rural Ohio where the fentanyl epidemic is killing people), producers editing the footage, etc. Cheaper and easier to have a few blowhards sitting around a table talking over each other. Anyone who depends on the cable "news" networks for their understanding of the world is a damned fool. I mean that in several senses of the phrase.
The last time I heard CNN for any extended period of time was in early 2017. I was eating dinner with my daughter at a funky Southern Maryland soul food restaurant that's been around since the days of segregation. It's run by old-school African Americans, so they loyally had the TV tuned to CNN, the Party channel of the polite left wing. Better than Fux at a truck stop! Some bloviator, maybe Michael Smerconish, possibly Don Lemon, was doing his yap show, ranting about Trumpinidiot, the orange Black Hole who sucks all the oxygen out of every room. Even though I agreed with what Smerc/Lem was saying, after about five minutes I wanted to scream "Shut this fucking thing off! Play some NEWS, goddamit! I'm sick of opinions when I want to hear facts!" I kept my yap shut, because it was not my turf, and concentrated on talking to my kid. MSNBC, even Rachel Maddow, is just as maddening to me.
It's possible to have a real 24-hour news network. Government-run ones are great. Down Undahere, the ABC ("A" standing for Australian) is paid for by the government, and it actually covers news events that happen around the country and across the world. There are opinion-talk shows, with cons as well as lefties, but 85% of the time it's straight news, a bit repetitious because they operate on a half-hour cycle, but mostly factual information. There's another government-run channel, SBS, that focuses more on international news, including running hour-long rebroadcasts of various countries' news programmes in their native language. Greek, Filipino, Iranian, Polish... The U.S. is represented by the PBS news Hour, which is like viewing a bowl of oatmeal. When I lived in Vancouver, the government-run CBC was another great source of by-the-book, straight-down-the-middle news. (Especially in contrast to the Canadian commercial news channels, which were Amerikan-level drecky.)
I haven't owned a telly (intentionally so) since December 2012, when I let my departing (now-ex) wife take it with her when she decamped to San Francisco. We used to have it tuned to MSNBC like background aural wallpaper, but I paid more attention to the Chyron news crawl than I did the voices. I get glimpses of local TV on the various hospital wards where I work. Much of it seems almost as weird as the psychiatric patients. I try to analyse the tube the same way I do the crazyppl: not so much the direct wording of the delusional content they're voicing, but what is the underlying message? Agitation? Paranoia? Depression? Suicidal intent? One thing's for sure -- like the mentally ill, television (including CNN) is a distorted, funhouse-mirror reflection of what's happening in the Newtonian Physics world of reality.
Because I had read a couple of his books and more or less enjoyed them, I used to occasionally catch Fareed Zakaria's Sunday morning show, until it became clear that it was just another generic "panel" show, three bland centrists and one contentious asshole, the usual nonsense. Aside from that, CNN was only good for watching Anthony Bourdain's show, and even that was as much commercials as content.
ReplyDeleteI do sometimes have MSNBC on as background noise late at night, if there's nothing on HBO. Mostly it's more of the same. I agree that televised news in the US is barely entertainment, and certainly not news. It is useful only for getting the local weather forecast -- usually.
Unfortunately, as we all know, television and social media are how an increasingly large proportion of 'murkins get the "facts" with which they assess the world and make their decisions accordingly. So it can't be completely ignored, as much as we'd like.
I try to analyse the tube the same way I do the crazyppl: not so much the direct wording of the delusional content they're voicing, but what is the underlying message? Agitation? Paranoia? Depression? Suicidal intent?
Yes, this. Obviously this wondrous new century has set whatever legit news industry we once had on its collective side, and they've scrambled for years to keep up with the tectonic changes. Trump's candidacy and the daily drama of its players pointed a clear path for them -- fear, chaos, discord, and impending doom.
I've mentioned before the scene from the Howard Stern autobio movie Private Parts, where early on the radio station is tracking Howard's listenership. The survey respondents who said they loved Stern listened for an average of 1½ hours, but the people who said they hated him said they listened for 2½ hours. I think there is a similar collective phenomenon going on with Trump. It's the car wreck you can't look away from -- all day, every day. Keep 'em agitated and they keep tuning in.
I haven't been overseas in a very long time, unfortunately, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect that the media companies, state-owned and private, do not have constantly churning 24-hour news cycles either. Americans have been kept in a state of perpetual agitation by decades of this.
And who pioneered the 24-hour news cycle? That's right, CNN.
Really, it seems that the teevee news is now just a loss-leader to push audience segments into other parts of the vertically integrated news borg in order to lob contents into the virtual abyss. Only the olds watch teevee anymore anyway, and the revenue model there is predicated on viewers buying the sponsors' products. But if you can push them over to the website or YouTube, you get paid by the click/view rate.