The Problem with Cable News
I was at CompUSA yesterday trying to scavenge something cool out of their liquidation sale and I walked by the TV area.
The TVs were tuned to CNN and they had breaking news: A small Cessna in Florida was having trouble with its landing gear.
Is this newsworthy? Probably. Is it a breaking story on a national news network? No.
You can see countless minute-long snippets like this on Maximum Exposure on SpikeTV late at night, but CNN chooses to devote 30 minutes to it during evening TV. Later as I was wandering the store, I walked by the TVs again and CNN had changed the headline: “Cessna with broken landing gear lands safely”
Just to be bipartisan, I’ll share another story. I was watching Fox News over lunch today and they had a Fox News Alert where they switched to a live field reporter. The story, you ask? President Bush’s airplane, Air Force One, was landing at Andrew’s AFB in Maryland.
That’s it. Nothing happened to the plane, or Bush. They were just landing the airplane. That was the story.
This brings me to my point. We have countless numbers of 24-hour news stations on cable TV nowadays. Unfortunately we don’t have 24 hours worth of news. The sad part is that people watch this drivel and assume they’re getting smarter, becauase, “Hey, it’s the news! It says so in the name of the channel.”
I used to be a big fan of CLTV. It’s a 24-hour news channel, but they don’t really worry about saying the same thing twice. (At least they’re not trying to fill time with too much bullshit.) If you watch it for more than about an hour, they literally repeat the same news clips. Lets you tune in whenever, catch up on what’s going on, then turn it off.
Now I’m that way with WBBM AM radio. Mmmm … traffic and weather together on the eights …