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."

President Obama and the Hopes of the Nation

Today Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, and tomorrow morning he will start work with an almost immeasurable burden of the nation's hopes weighing on his shoulders. Right now, the New York Times has a fascinating interactive feature called "I hope so, too" (or at least, that's how it would read if the writers at the Times were still literate people) that distills into 29 categories the responses of 200 people from 14 states who were asked to name their greatest hopes for the Obama presidency . The feature allows readers to hear excerpts from the answers of the people who were interviewed and click on a button if they share the hopes that were expressed. In addition, there are already over 600 posted comments that state many other hopes not included in the feature.

I clicked on so many of the hopes in the feature that I lost count, but these ten were among the ones I shared:

1. Enact universal health care
2. Protect the environment
3. Improve the economy
4. Improve education
5. End the war in Iraq
6. Promote gay rights
7. Restore civil liberties
8. Close the prison at Guantanamo Bay
9. Increase government accountability
10. Restore the separation of church and state

There were other hopes expressed that I also share whole-heartedly (such as ending global poverty) and some that I definitely do not share (such as ending the right to abortion or keeping our troops deployed in the Middle East), but ten seems like a good number, so these are mine. However, it seems to me that the one hope that would make at least some of the hopes listed above possible is that the government should embrace bipartisanship in order to act in the best interests of the nation and the world. Unfortunately, given the entrenched behavior of politicans, I expect to read about the discovery of a universal cure for cancer before I read about concrete examples of politicians of both parties working together to accomplish important national goals.

In my experience, political behavior denotes self-interested action that is mainly directed at pleasing the interest groups that will keep the politician in office, whether it benefits the nation or not. Think of kowtowing to the corporations that give the politicians money. Think of pork barrel projects. Think of the military-industrial complex. Think of Henry Paulson giving $350 billion to his friends at U.S. banks and insurance companies without demanding any accountability. How do we get from these actions to enacting universal health care or rescuing the economy? Yes, I believe in separation of church and state, but even so it will take a lot of prayers to get the powers that be in our government to change the way they operate, and I am not optimistic.

Pasadena Where?

If anyone needs proof that some major newspapers don't have enough serious stuff to write about, one might consider the New York Times' apparent fascination with a guy named James Macpherson, who has outsourced the local news coverage of his Pasadena news website to India. Today it was Maureen Dowd's turn to discuss this "horrendous" (just a little news-speak, folks) betrayal of American journalism. I had to yawn through six paragraphs before I discovered the name of this online news site, which is called Pasadena Now, and couldn't help wondering why the Times didn't provide a link to it.

Not that there is anything particularly interesting there. It's rather like the local newspapers I grew up with in Oswego County, The Fulton Patriot and the Oswego Valley News, which consisted mainly of photographs, local stories, announcements of pending events, promotion of local people and businesses, and advertisements. You know the kind of newspaper I mean-- if your high school team won a game, your picture would be in the paper a week or two later, and columns of print were devoted to publishing the local schools' honor rolls. Actually, Pasadena Now is more attractive, though not necessarily more substantial, than that. In any case, it's more colorful, and there are more bells and whistles, but I bet if you look deep enough you'll find last week's league bowling scores somewhere.

This isn't the first time Mr. MacPherson and his outsourcing have made the New York Times. Last year, it got coverage in the Times blog "Freakonomics." Could it be because journalists at the nation's flagship newspaper are worried about losing their jobs to part-time workers from Mumbai and Bangalore? No, it has to be the gently bizarre image of someone in India sitting down with various internet references to cobble together news stories for an online newspaper half a world away. According to Dowd, MacPherson pays his writers $7.50 per 1000 words to write local news stories for Pasadena Now. She quotes one of these writers, who lives in Mysore, India: “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always. Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

The Rose Bowl as a food event-- I have to admit that this tickled my fancy enough to make me actually go and look at Pasadena Now and try to figure which stories were being written in India. Of course, they don't just hand you this information on a plate, but the byline "From STAFF REPORTS" appears frequently on brief local news stories, such as "Police Patrols Protect Shoppers." What these articles have in common is that they're short, and most of them are just bare facts. The writing and eccentric punctuation are about standard for newspaper writing these days. If MacPherson and newspapers like the Times hadn't made such a big deal about it, people in Pasadena probably wouldn't have noticed any difference. Well, maybe the seven employees who got fired would have noticed, but I bet no one else would have.