No More Cable News for Me

Does this caption look like it came from a tabloid? That's what I think, too.

Okay, I've had it. I am through watching news on the cable news channels. All of their so-called virtues are vices in my book. Their highly-touted "raw, honest reporting" means sloppy, raucous drivel a good deal of the time. Honest is good, if it means factual and sincere, but I have my doubts whether anyone at CNN, MSNBC or Fox News Channel remembers what factual and sincere are about. And what's so good about raw? Thoughtful, insightful, well-considered reporting is what I'm looking for, and I have finally concluded that I will never find it on a 24-hour cable news network.

You may be asking yourself why it has taken me so long to reach this conclusion. The answer is that I am dumb, stubborn, and suffer from self-delusion. Even so, I have my limits, and the limits have been exceeded. No more crackpots like Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, and Sean Hannity. No more blowhards like Chris Matthews. No more breathless, fast-talking twerps like Anderson Cooper. No more smarmy, self-important anchors like Wolf Blitzer. No more talking heads shouting each other down. Even on Fareed Zakaria GPS the guests yell at each other and drown each other out. I thought Fareed Zakaria had more brains than that. No more yelping silliness from Keith Olbermann, the most sophomoric so-called newsman in the world! No more pundits of any kind. No more shouts of: "Breaking news! This just in!" I can't take it anymore, and I have exercised my right to change the station once and for all.

So what finally pushed me over the edge? Well, it was a variety of things. I'm tired of being shouted at and hectored by news anchors and overzealous journalists and pundits. I'm tired of having my intelligence insulted by people who are desperately trying to keep me on the hook for just one more segment. I'm tired of Jack Cafferty reading out the silly answers to his silly questions and his blatant self-promotion. I'm tired of journalists interviewing journalists as if they were important people. I'm tired of "balanced" meaning one talking head from Column A and one from Column B and giving them a very short time to slug it out and see who can talk the fastest and the loudest. I'm sick to death of Wolf Blitzer cutting off an interviewee just as he or she starts to say something interesting that deviates from the script. I'm even sicker to death of Chris Matthews calling abusive monologues interviews.

And if that isn't enough, I'm tired of the ads for Flomax and Cialis, big ugly trucks and SUVs, and online banks, insurance companies, and stockbrokers. And even more, I'm sick of ads for gadgets, debt-reduction companies, cash for your gold jewelry, and all the other advertisements that look like they came out of the back pages of the trashy magazines I remember from my youth. In fact, it finally dawned on me that 24-hour news networks are tabloids, and I don't like it.

Fine, now that we have all that taken care of, what am I going to do for news? First, I'm going to continue to read the New York Times online. They have their share of annoying articles, but they don't shout at you, and you don't have to read anything you don't want to. There may be ads, but they are easier to ignore. Second, when I want TV news, I am going to watch The News Hour With Jim Lehrer on PBS. No more "raw" news for me. On the News Hour, people with brains have already reviewed the news stories of the day, made a choice about what is important to cover, and examined it in depth. It's moderate and low-key, and the pundits (there is no escaping pundits) don't shout at each other. And I may watch Washington Week in Review on PBS, as well. Gwen Iffel sits down with four journalists with expertise in certain areas and reviews the week's news for one half hour every week. Quietly, politely, with no shouting. I like that, and that's what I'm going with from now on.

Of course, if there really is a crisis of the kind that has you hanging on the TV and waiting for any and every bit of information that comes along, I may have to watch CNN, but I'm hoping it doesn't happen anytime soon. And even then, I'm going to impose a quota. As Walter Cronkite used to say, "And that's the way it is."