Stuck at home in a cast, our writer
agreed to watch Fox, MSNBC and
CNN ... nonstop ... for a week.
What he realized by 7:45AM Monday
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/01/12/a-new-survivors-show-watching-a-week-of-cable-news-and-living/While I am normally a permissive fellow, the rules that I would impose upon myself would be rigid. My time would be evenly split among CNN, Fox News and MSNBC as I varied the programming on a daily basis. These three networks would be my only news sources as I avoided newspapers (sob), news Web sites like Politics Daily (double sob) and any other television or radio programming. If cable TV can't give me the world in 720 long minutes, then what is CNN doing claiming to be "the worldwide news leader"?
What adds a frisson of novelty to my cockamamie couch-potato quest is that I never watch cable TV news or even network news. (Is David Brinkley still on?) Okay, as a political columnist, I occasionally turn on cable TV for live news events like Chris Dodd's withdrawal announcement last week. But I scrupulously avoid the talking-head instant analysis believing that (in a variant of Gresham's Law) predictable commentary drives any original thought out of my brain.
(snip)
Just when I began to wonder whether I could make my 12-hour goal without resorting to underhanded gambits like sleeping in front of the TV with the sound on mute, I was revitalized by my first encounter ever with Glenn Beck. With his buzz cut and his chalk board, the Fox News anchor made me feel like I had been transported back to seventh grade with a manic social studies teacher who was inventing his own curriculum. I will admit that I was rather stunned by Beck's flimflam mastery of false parallels as he somehow likened Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez. But I loved Beck's personal sound effects from his "blehs" to his "yada yadas" as he mocked everyone to the left of Ron Paul. Beck was such an electric performer that I totally ignored the Fox News crawl until I looked down while a picture of Mao was on the screen and was jolted by the chyron wording "denied using steroids."
Good, funny article.
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