Cable News: B.S.!

I rarely watch any of the cable news channels, but yesterday I saw that Bill Maher was going to be on "Hardball" with Chris Matthews. I was in awe of how insulting this show must be to anyone with a brain.

Matthews did not acknowledge anything that Maher said, spoke over him, and laughed like a drooling simpleton at one of Maher's remarks for about 2 minutes' worth of the interview. (The comment wasn't even a punchline...just a comment in the middle of a sentence.)

This made me curious, however, about how the rest of the shows on cable news are. Later in the evening, I watched about 5 minutes of "Scarborough" and was appalled. The host spent most of a very short interview with a Democrat shouting them down and interrupting them, then he went on to a conservative shithead who used some obscure, poorly documented story from Vietnam to "prove" that protesting the war helps our enemies.

I've bounced around from channel to channel in the last day just to check out other points of view on cable news and this is what I've noticed:

* There is no reporting. It's all sensationalism. Even when they do bring up a real news story, they use such a condescending tone that no one is bound to listen anyway.

* There is a lot of complaining on these boards that Chris Matthews is a shill for the Republicans. I say this: NO SHIT. Watch the commercials on his show, for God's sake! In the half hour that I watched, every single advertisement was for an oil company! This guy may have been a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, but there's NO WAY that he could be anything BUT partisan with those advertisers.

* Speaking of commercials...I saw Bush* campaign ads in really heavy rotation just bashing Kerry. Where are the Kerry ads?!?

In short, cable news is a very scary thing to me. I think that most everyone knows what a load of biased shit Fox News is, but CNN and MSNBC are just as bad (if not worse) by portraying themselves as unbiased. If I were someone who watched cable news to get my information everyday, I think that I would be a staunch supporter of Bush*. You see nothing that inspires you to think for yourself, nothing but content that is approved by the corporations running ads, and ad after ad that sings the praises of Bush*, while bashing Kerry.

This is a real problem. We need to wake America up. This is turning into a nation idiots mesmerized by shiny objects.

Was when Mathews interviewed Kerry on Tuesday night. He was interviewing and had to interrupt for a commercial break.

Any guess what the commercial was?

That's Right!!!

I'm George W. Bush and I authorized this message.

sickening. just sickening.

on the most conservative shows, i.e. all of Fox, Scarborough, Hardball.

I feel for you if that was your maiden voyage to cable news. It is not news. It is entertainment. They let the news media do the leg work. Then they pick a stupid story (like Kerry's medals) that requires no thinking on anyone's part, so it plays well on TV. Then they beat the story to death in sound bites. They have all their rollerdeck money grubbing pundits lined up to blabber on and on and then collect pay checks without saying anything that anyone will rememeber by the time the next show comes on where the next group of clowns will be talking about the same things the last show talked about. It is endless crap!

we might see better balance. As it is, cable is just another media right-wing hellhole, with very few exceptions.

Nice write-up, bkcc

with "opt-out" provisions. Believe it or not, McCain has been one of the loudest on this; I know, I wouldn't believe it either unless I saw it myself on C-SPAN. The great thing about "opt-out", rather than just having the channel blocked, is that it denies revenue to that cable channel. Imagine all the liberals and leftists dropping Faux and MSGOP en masse, and think about what kind of effect that would have.

The main problem is that politicians are bought, ergo government is AWOL on its regulatory duties, ergo cable (a regulated monopoly) has become a cesspool. If they get Scarborough (R-intern killer) and Dennis Miller (R-I bought my audience), then we should get Free Speech TV.

With the exception of CSpan it appears that they are all nothing more than paid political shills for * and the promotion of destroying America.

It's not the first time that I've watched cable news. Just the first time in a long, long, long time.

I get most of my news from the Internet and I'll occasionally watch BBC World News as well.

(It's sad that the most accurate reporting we can get about our own country comes from another nation's news media.)

And BTW, talking about media whitewash of Bush,
President of CNN was on Lou Dobbs last nite.

He let slip "when I worked for Governor Rockefeller along with Henry Kissinger...."

Kissinger Dr.Strangelove, President of CNN Rockefeller/Kissinger Cohort,as is Bremer, MSNBC owned by
G.E. munitions profiteer, Murdoch/Fox......

there's our answer to the "whitewash"....

what are we going to do about it?