Cable News

  It all started when the Pope was dying.  I sat in front of the television, eyes glued to the lights in those three Vatican windows, listening to the commentary from everyone who had ever been in the same room as the Pontiff.  His assistants, other Cardinals, various biographers, a lady in Boston who saw him give mass once, two teenagers in St. Peter’s Square.

  In the past three weeks, I have become a junky for these talking-head shows.  Actually, we don’t call them that anymore.  We call them “news shows.”  The face of television news couldn’t have changed more over the past thirty years if Michael Jackson was its poster child. And if you’ve been watching recently, you might think that he is.  Calling MSNBC (for example) a “news channel” is like referring to Spam as steak. 

   Nevertheless, I’m hooked on it.  It’s a guilty pleasure, I know, because it perpetuates the sensationalizing of news.  Every time MSNBC breaks away from its coverage of the Michael Jackson trial to televise another high-speed chase in Los Angeles, or a standoff with the BTK Killer, and millions of us tune in, we contribute to the softening of television news.  But it’s a temptation that I’m not strong enough to resist.

  Network news can’t compete with this kind of programming.  The networks have all lost the anchors we grew up watching: Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings.  Who needs nightly news when CNN is being pumped into every household in America?  And if you don’t have the attention span for CNN, there’s always Headline News.

  Why would we want to watch the nightly news for the highlight reel of the car chase, when we can watch the whole car chase live on MSNBC?  The so-called news channels understand this, and the viewers are starting to figure it out.

  The cable news channels are starting to veer away from reporting the news the way MTV gave up on music videos.  It’s all specialty programs, with your favorite celebrity’s commentary on the day’s top news stories.  CNBC, for example, was once of interest only to stock brokers.  Now their dry stock-market analysis is peppered with reality shows like “The Contender” and Conan O’Brien reruns and Dennis Miller and Donny Deutsch.

  HBO has even gotten into the game with “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “Real Sports,” and they’re bringing Bob Costas back for his own sports show.

  I haven’t seen the numbers lately, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart is more watched than any of the networks’ nightly newscasts. 

  Our sense of news has changed.  It’s no longer Walter Cronkite sitting at a desk and reading the day’s top stories.  We are always looking to be entertained, and news is no exception.  We no longer care about “fair and balanced” reporting, which explains why Fox News is still around.  We want our news anchors to have common sense, but we don’t want them to take themselves or the news too seriously.

  It seems that we have realized that news and entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  Now they are inextricably intertwined, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

 -From Pulse
   April 21, 2005