Cable News: Enough!

Whenever you turn on the tube to watch the news, on any channel, you don't need to wait long to figure out where the deception is. Most media critics focus on the actual news being delivered, and on how it's being delivered and the choice of words and tone used - they're looking in the wrong place. The real deception is in the news that is not being reported at all.

Pick any day and you will find this problem to be ubiquitous. In the US, the media corporations give the viewers the illusion that the three main Cable news channels (MSNBC, CNN, and FOX) represent the semi-totality of the ideological spectrum, yet they all report the same news stories except with three different sets of opinions/commentary. This past week, and still ongoing, the major stories have been: the invasion of illegal immigrants, the anchor baby (with a special edition of terror anchor baby, comes with fries and coke), the mosque "at" ground zero, and Dr. Laura Schlessinger's N word. Even if you don't watch the news for an entire week, you're bound to hear about some of these stories from friends and colleagues who did get exposure. That is if you haven't watched them with a Stewart/Colbert twist, for those who would normally get a heart attack from looking at Soledad O'Brien's facial expressions.

After that, the discussion of these same stories is carried onto the net: email forwards, facebook statuses and messages, links to Youtube, then related-links to those links, then emailing each other and commenting on them, reacting to them, contemplating them, only to sit down the next day, and the next, and the next, watching the same news sources shed "more light" on the subject with more experts and celebrities, voicing their five- to seven-minute sound bites while audaciously being referred to by the show hosts as "discussions" or "debates."

What the viewer should be wondering is: what news hasn't been covered today? Why do we have to wait for Wikileaks or Michael Moore to find out what happened five or ten years ago in Afghanistan and Iraq? Most worthy news seems to have a very hard time getting to the surface, without delays. For instance, to find out what really happened on September 13, 2007, when Israeli F-16s and Falcons bombed a North Korean building (for WMD manufacturing) in Syria, with not much Syrian protest, we had to wait till Richard Clarke's book "Cyber War" came out in April of 2010! What else is happening right now that we will only discover three years later?

If the news we watch today, on any channel, is nothing but a deception; a pot pourri of mindless yammering about eye-catching stories, we might as well just stop following the mainstream news altogether. Let us also not forget to add Neil Postman's insight (from his book: Amusing Ourselves to Death) that world news actually makes us numb, because it's always happening "there," completely irrelevant to our lives "here." Moreover, for every hour of news, 20 to 25 minutes are reserved for commercials. We're spending a little under half of our time on the tube watching commercials.

The 24-hour cable news channels are entertainment venues, and their task is to steer the entire country away from the important issues, and into the topics they want us to be thinking about, providing the same story through different ideological binoculars to suit all the varying tastes, while simultaneously having their pundits and anchors reminding us that they don't understand why everyone is talking about those topics. But this should not come to anyone's surprise. As profit-generating entities, these news channels will put anything between two commercial breaks that attracts the viewer's attention. The more ridiculous and controversial the story is, the more profits are expected to rise.
You can almost see them in your head, editors and contributors sitting together every day, sifting through news stories, deciding on which piece will give them the highest viewership, while simultaneously receiving the approval of their corporate masters. Once the channel is on, it's really hard to take one's eyes off the screen! Well, I want to know what's gonna happen to that ground-zero mosque, don't you? The anxiety keeps building up! And the more I watch, the more I want to keep watching. But by the time the story comes to an end, I would have already been following two or three newer stories. Today they didn't mention the anchor baby story, but they did bring up the "Is Obama a Muslim" story.

You don't have to wait for a power outage to make you feel alive again. Turn the TV off, put some soothing music on that stereo you haven't used for ages. Grab a drink from the kitchen, recline your seat, and read that book you have been postponing for some time now.