When I was growing up people got news from the local Newspaper, Network News and maybe 60 Minutes, or 5th Estate if you lived in Canada. I will always remember the tiny black and white plastic television that sat near our kitchen table, it was fun watching the Brady Bunch while pretending to do homework but everybody had to be quiet when the News was on! So I was never completely unaware of the world growing up but people didn't care as much about news stories then it seemed. The main points of whatever issue of the day were probably well understood by most people through this medium but I don't remember the editorializing like we have today, everybody's entitled to an opinion now.
The morning of September 11th 2001 was just another Tuesday for me, the weather was dull and cool the day before and would be for another few days. My big plan for the day was to watch Dr. Phil on Oprah, who was going to be appearing every Tuesday to tell wacky women to get real, my other plans were to walk the dog, weather pending, and maybe do dishes. I didn't even watch news in the morning in those days, other than for weather because I live in Canada and local traffic. When I turned on the TV I was all uh-oh, Live News, smoking building that I recognize as the UN or World Trade Centre in New York. Wasn't thinking of the time difference, hadn't even had one coffee yet but I was worried people were in there burning to death. My husband was just going out the door and almost to the garage when I yelled out the back door "someone blew up a building in New York!"
I used to mainly watch Canadian Networks for news in those days but during 9/11 all our information was pretty much coming from American feeds anyway so why not just flip to CNN since they are probably there in New York right now?. And that's how it started. I watched CNN until probably 2am that day. I flipped over to the Golden Girls because I thought it would be light and take my mind off this stuff but it was the episode where Rose was dreaming about her dead husband and thinking it was real until Blanche had a heart to heart with her and helped her accept reality. That didn't help! I also had so many questions about the mysterious terrorists and if there were survivors and if Bush was going to start bombing somebody, did I need to start driving to the in-laws farm? That's when I became addicted to breaking news, it didn't help the Anthrax thing was just after that and who knew what Bush was planning after these attacks?
In those 9/11 days I was the only person I knew who watched The Daily Show and I thoroughly enjoyed his questioning and mockery of the relatively new phenomenon of Cable News, I see that period as when Cable News and Jon Stewart were becoming what we know them as now. Maybe I kept watching CNN to see if they were going to ask some hard questions when the Iraq War started. Well they didn't, but at least the state of comedy was reaching new highs. Watching from Canada many of us could see a bias toward the Bush administration on CNN and a disregard for actual journalism. FOX News was not allowed in Canada in those days but I could see what they were doing by watching The Daily Show and it all looked dangerous, like dangerous to standard democratic pratices such as journalism, everything was becoming opinion and personalities.
Of course FOX News led the wave of personality opinions, and still does, they say they are #1 in ratings but that is in the over 50 demographic, number one with old folks, doesn't seem like a sustainable plan to me. Even if they are popular or not maybe it's perceived that way by other Cable News outfits. This is probably why we see CNN trying to have personalities like Lou Dobbs or Rick Sanchez only to find out maybe they have too much personality to handle! It seems CNN is always trying to pander to some sort of popularity contest, now they're all about tweeting and having Jack Cafferty read out people's online comments. I thought I liked the Cafferty File segments, at least I did when he was slandering the Bush Administration and openly supporting Obama, now it's all about supporting the Tea Party, and maybe the reason is not with Jack himself but CNN trying to increase ratings. So they are not actual news but a ratings seeking business. Sure, news has always been a business but a business with standards, it used to be that way, it's important for the democracy everyone says they love so much, to report facts so we can make decisions about who we'd like to represent us.
Yesterday I saw Michael Moore on Keith Olberman's Countdown, sorry CNN I went looking for information elsewhere, turns out a guy called Wendell Potter who used to work for the Health Insurance industry is openly apologizing for an organized smear campaign against Moore and his movie Sicko. We also learn that big Insurance companies helped create a fake front group called Health Care America Now that CNN interviewed as a real entity. Yet not a word of this story on CNN today, News You Can Trust? I think it would cut into all the time they devote to gushing over the Tea Party. Now we know CNN was giving air time to a fake organization just to create drama I think they should make a retraction. They are all about drama though, I got really turned off by their blatant support of the Tea Party marches and later candidates for office, the smiling reports on Obama's falling approval numbers. It seemed like they were trying to write a script or at least force a prediction they could be right about. I remember all their predictions about incumbent rage, everyone is going to vote against incumbents, which didn't come true, at least in the numbers they were talking about. I was expecting Wolf Blitzer to start a countdown to the "Death of Hope", maybe they would have a countdown clock in the corner of the screen to the exact moment everybody lost their audacity of hope?
So I don't watch as much news anymore, or at least I'm trying, I sometimes still need to know how stories are being covered in the wide world of infotainment. I agree with Jon Stewart when he says if FOX is going to be right and MSNBC is going to be left then maybe CNN should try actual journalism. Somebody should, because Cable News is more about Royal Weddings than potential war between the Koreas, this is why so many of us would rather get information from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report or Bill Maher. It seems like these comedy guys do more research and explore more sides of a story than what we call news these days. When you study Art History and look at the French Revolution period one gets very bored of the fluffy pastel Baroque style of painting with fat ladies and cupid characters flying all over. What is considered among the most important works of that period is actually the satirical cartoons, it says a lot, people will tire of style, it is substance that they seek.
OK, gotta go now, CNN is interviewing Alaska's Tea Party backed Joe Miller, I think they're trying to cause more drama by supporting his fantasy that he won the election over Lisa Murkowski.
No comments:
Post a Comment