...Comment) from FOKNewsChannel: "Even The Media Began To Sit Up And Take Notice"
http://foknewschannel.com/Excerpt:
Media at the moment – especially television – honors the foreign correspondent, the disaster correspondent, and the feel-good correspondent. The all-too-real dangers and terrors of reporting from revolutions is not to be disparaged and is not being so here. Other than the waste of time (“that’s when Porfirio Altamirano learned that a horse, not a dog, can be man’s best friend”) the feel-good correspondent isn’t too much of a blight. But you can also go to New Orleans, have yourself filmed walking around the reeking hulks of a city for twenty minutes, show half the video tape, and proclaim yourself a grizzled field reporter and an edgy political commentator – and your bosses will agree with you and turn it into a promo.
But a complicated, essential domestic political story offers no opportunity for getting photographed helping out poor wet people. It has the perils of alienating right wing viewers (who grow as an audience percentage simply by dint of the reality that the left, and the youth, have been abandoning television as a primary means of information consumption for the last 15 years). I mean, Republicans give cocktail parties too! From a personal-vicarious-thrill point of view, the only time a tv anchor or especially a tv political “reporter” wants to stray too far from New York or Washington is to go to flood-ravaged Madison or earthquake-stricken Milwaukee or rotten-cheese-plagued Green Bay. Television news in this country is much as Shakespearean acting was described in the middle of the last century: Nobody actually brings anything new to it (I here feel compelled to say to my acquaintance Sir Ian McKellen: This Does Not Apply To You). They simply are doing impressions of what they saw Olivier or Gielgud do.
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