comment #1

Noel Murray says ...

Some of us just can't stand cable news, and find other ways to stay informed. Newspapers, the internet, etc.

comment #2

Mr. Muckle says ...

I used to watch that cable news BS, but in the end I wasn't proud of it. Broadcast news channels are useless, of course, unless you want to catch up on your old peoples' medicine ads. Now I keep up with news via internet, but I'm not proud of that either. It's hard to see how it improves the quality of my life. It seems like more of an addiction to trivial entertainment. On top of that, all this conditions the mind to a conventional worldview that is as ghastly in its own way as anything owned by the shitkickers.

As an experiment try saving all the articles you would have read one day and open them up the next day instead. BORING! Straight to the trash. Amazing how worthless they seem a day later.

I half-envy people who just groom horses or feed birds or something like that.

comment #3

Craig Kennedy says ...

Cable Shmable. Some of us read our news.

I fear for the 23 plus 2.6 million who rely on television.

comment #4

supertaster says ...

"Every time you take a hard look at things it comes down to the same equation -- a small percentage is paying real attention to what's going on, and the vast majority is walking around in a kind of narcotized broadcast-media head space. "

...that's what happens when you live in a welfare state...

...and don't dismiss foxnews outright...when they're bad they're 10x worse than anything matthews or olbermann could ever come up with...but they at least *pretend* to show both sides of the coin...even if it just to humiliate them they always have guests on with diferent and opposed viewpoints, thus granting a much wider and objective picture than msnbc where the tendency is to have only guests willing to toss the salad of the host(s)...

comment #5

dp4m says ...

Jeff - you realize that FoxNews is a cable news channel as well, so lumping that in with Access Hollywood, etc. is futile if we're talking about the 8/9ths that don't watch cable, right?

Also, if McCain really *did* say "I dont know how to use a computer," I'd be more inclined to believe that is political code like "I don't believe in judicial activism" which is saying more that he's a fan of the blue collars than the white collars rather than anything else. And I say this as a registered (but jaded) Democrat who's nearly-certain to be voting Obama this fall...

comment #6

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

Add me to those who disagree with the basic assumption that people who pay attention to cable news are well-informed about events. They're well-informed about a certain type of TV-friendly event, which often as not is total bullshit, or at least easily hyped (McCAIN VOTED AGAINST THE TROOPS!!!! OBAMA'S PREACHER SAID GOD DAMN AMERICA!!!!!!)

For me what works, more or less, is following this stuff online and catching as much of that stuff as is reflected there, but not absorbing it directly. (Sort of like getting my fill of Tom Cruise or Dark Knight news here, without actually watching Access Hollywood.)

Still, let's not kid ourselves that the constant flow of information is ever all that well-informed. One reason I just don't run around in a panic about the war in Iraq, even as I am routinely informed here that EVERYONE KNOWS it is absolutely a fuckup, lost, makes us hated, creates terrorists, etc., is a certain basic doubt at bottom that, in fact, any of us know anything about how something like that is really unfolding; I read the things they don't about the progress that is happening there, but I know that they read the things I don't about the fuckups that are happening there, so I try to preserve a certain humility (as little as it may be in evidence on occasion) that in fact I can know anything for sure about events so recent. In the end, we'd all be better off reading fewer websites and more books on the subject, and thinking less about what happened in the last newscycle and more about what happened over the last century, but I'm as much a slave to the idiot-box-with-keyboard-and-mouse as anybody here.

As I just demonstrated.

comment #7

mitchtaylor says ...

Cable news is so 1992.

comment #8

supertaster says ...

...and Jeff, admitting you get most of your info from cable "news" does not speak well for your own intellectual capacity to know and discuss an issue fully.

I may be repeating what has already been said, but those cable "news" programs are not news at all...they are editorials...to think you can watch cable news and be well informed is scary...it's also one of the big reasons very few people are able to engage in constructive debate today, as neither debater--usually sticking to the same sources of clockwise or counterclockwise spin (msnbc, cnn, foxnews)--knows anything concrete about the other side of the issue... at least most of what is presented on broadcast tv sticks loosely to the facts while keeping commentary to a minimum...

...and how you can sit there and watch people preening and screaming over each other hour after hour and not go numb is, again, scary. The 'Road to the Whitehouse' hour on MSNBC with the clashing talking heads and background music (!) is one of the most insufferable chores of television I have ever tried to sit through...

comment #9

Bilge says ...

Yeah, as someone who watches a lot (A LOT) of cable news, I can tell you: Cable news is not part of the solution, it's most definitely part of the problem.

comment #10

lbeale says ...

Jeff, please:
I never watch cable news. Ever. Yet everyday I read the BBC, CNN, N.Y. Times, L.A. Times and New York Daily News websites. I also get the Guardian Weekly print edition. Just because most Americans don't watch the endlessly blathering, endlessly boring, talking heads on cable news, doesn't mean they're not INFORMED. There are soo many options out there.

comment #11

JHRussell says ...

I can't believe that a reasonably intelligent person could not have known that the audience for cable news shows is tiny tiny tiny...the network broadcasts are shrinking, too, and those numbers look suspiciously high to me...but cable news has a ridiculously small share of the viewership.

Also - cable "news" hardly exists anymore, if it ever did - it is purely cable "editorials and commentary" now, and I frankly get sick of it and don't watch it much anymore.

comment #12

gruver1 says ...

Wells to Supertaster (i.e., the new incarnation of Jeff McMahon): Obviously I don't mean I depend exclusively upon cable news. Obviously you're aware of this. I read online sites, newspapers...everything I can find. Did I mention that I think you're a dick? No? Okay -- you're a dick.

comment #13

alynch says ...

I'll agree with everyone else. The amount of cable news you watch is a horrible standard by which to judge how well-informed of a person someone is. The triumph of cable news is the triumph of shallowness. By the way, it's also worth noting that most people who watch cable news are doing it instead of reading newspapers, which have the luxury of being more substantive.

comment #14

thevisceral says ...

I wait for Big Chief to send me smoke signals over the hill.

comment #15

T. S. Idiot says ...

Like many of those who have commented earlier, I get most of my news from the Web. After reading about the flooding in Iowa yesterday, I turned on CNN Headline News when I got home from work to see the latest, but CNN was still consumed by the dead boy scouts, which, tragic though the situation may be, was old news by that point. Don't they realize that news means what's happening now?

Speaking of boring, I used to listen to NPR regularly but haven't for years. Because my audiobook ran out while I was running errands last weekend, I tuned in to NPR and was bored shitless in seconds. If it ain't about American foreign policy, the pompous NPR blowhards don't care. NPR has long been attacked for being too liberal--though not by me--but too self-righteous it is.

comment #16

Bocephus says ...

..Supertaster sure does love him some ellipsis...

comment #17

George Prager says ...

What the fuck? The less cable one watches the better. The less cable news the better. IF you watch cable news all day like I do, you see that any newscast can be broken up by a report of a truck explosion in Speonk. Unfortunately at work I have cable news on all the time. At home, I don't have cable, so I don't know who won Project Runaway, except I do because I watch the Today Show and look at gawker, defamer, etc.. I listen to NPR, read newspapers online, read blogs. But really, who gives a shit? I could go live in the woods without any media for a year and still know that John McCain would make a terrible president.

It's a good thing 24/7 cable news didn't exist when this happened:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=xf-swaec_40

comment #18

supertaster says ...

Who the hell is Jeff McMahon?

"And people wonder why this is essentially a Red country with tiny little Blue nerve centers in and around the big cities."

Tiny little Blue nerve centers crowded with people who look and behave just like the Red staters in everyway except for the way they vote.

Being called a dick by Jeff Wells, now that's an honor.

Sorry Jeff, you said 'the cable-satellite TV information world that I and everyone I know lives in " implying that you get most of your info from these wonky blabbermouths. At a minimum--based on the biased sources of information to which you profess limiting yourself-- you are not getting, nor do you seem to be seeking, raw or objective information. You seem to subject yourself to filtered information and only filtered information...that's ok for cocktails parties in the valley where everyone is standing around trying to save people from themselves, but not when you're positioning yourself as a political pundit and authority on issues in front of 10,000 monthly unique visitors.

For months you have been bemoaning the lack of critical thinking amongst non-Obama supporters, yet you fail to expose yourself to anything that challenges your life-view or personal politics and would cause you to use the critical part of your own brain. If you're limiting yourself to sources that cause you to nod agreeingly instead of furrow your brow, you've got your head either in the sand with all of the women and fat Appalachians or planted squarely up one of their a......nevermind, that's sure to get me banned...again.

comment #19

MovieBob says ...

Jeff,

You want to REALLY bring yourself down? Look at talk radio numbers and realize that on any given day a local major-to-mid-market (usually conservative) talk show host has a larger audience than all the cables COMBINED. Limbaugh, even at this point, is frequently heard live by more people than almost any human speaker ever. EVER.

It's not that only a small number of people "care" about news, it's that everyone has their own version of what they "need" to keep up on: Cable-addicts can look down on Evening News only viewers, web newshounds can look down on Cables, and meanwhile there's guys actually in-the-shit in Iraq etc. who think they're BOTH stunningly misinformed.

Y'know what I'd like to see? An actual breakdown of how many self-identified "liberals" watch a TON of Fox News. I bet it's pretty substantial - I mean, if it wasn't The Colbert Report would have no audience since there'd be no one with a frame of reference for his spot-on O'Reilly/Gibson/Smith pastiche. Almost every proudly left-leaning aquaintance I have knows more Fox personalities by name than folks supposedly in the channel's target-demo.

comment #20

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

Man, I can't believe I left juicy bait out there and no one bit at it. Should we go to D.Z.'s parents' house and make sure he's okay?

"If it ain't about American foreign policy, the pompous NPR blowhards don't care."

It's pretty much a known fact that there was all-out gang war between the news folks and the arts folks at NPR, and the news folks won. I too enjoyed NPR far more when its newsmagazine shows had a fully-rounded cultural orientation and weren't just reporting from Washington (and most certainly, the left side of Washington).

comment #21

supertaster says ...

Terrible news...Tim Russert is dead.

A guy who was the complete opposite of the caricature I just painted of Wells...a guy who would put his spin on things, but wouldn't label you a worthless human being for disagreeing with him...

comment #22

George Prager says ...

As for NRP, I like "On Point", "This American Life", "The World". (I think these shows are PRI, but it's all the same, isn't it?) Most of the time I'm half listening.

Sorry to hear about Tim Russert. Supertaster need to take his lumps like a man.

comment #23

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

Apropos of how fully people on each side are informed... just ran across this quote from Susan Sontag, in 1970:

''Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?''

This was in an essay she wrote for The Nation.

The Nation edited this part out.

comment #24

D.Z. says ...

"What happened to the idea of a 21st Century information revolution and the resultant strengthening of our democracy?"

If it makes you feel better, Jeff, with print media, it took over half a decade for people to know the real story behind the Gulf of Tonkin attack, while, thanks to the internets, it only took two years for people to realize that Bush was an incompetent liar. And the names and appearances of progressives like Al Franken would probably be blacklisted from traditional media outlets in favor of more moderate commentators. The revolution has kicked in, but we still have to fight the gatekeepers to win it.

Muckle: "As an experiment try saving all the articles you would have read one day and open them up the next day instead. BORING! Straight to the trash. Amazing how worthless they seem a day later."

Some, yes. But many offer a better understanding of the world than you get from print media, which assumes you already know the preceding information involved in the update.

taster: "...that's what happens when you live in a welfare state..."

If that were the case, then the Europeans would be the ones watching reality tv non-stop.

"but they at least *pretend* to show both sides of the coin...even if it just to humiliate them"

That's not really showing both sides...

"they always have guests on with diferent and opposed viewpoints, "

If fascist, right-of-center, and moderate and be considered "different", then sure.

Mgmax: "which often as not is total bullshit, or at least easily hyped (McCAIN VOTED AGAINST THE TROOPS!!!! OBAMA'S PREACHER SAID GOD DAMN AMERICA!!!!!!)"

The first one isn't bs.

"I read the things they don't about the progress that is happening there, but I know that they read the things I don't about the fuckups that are happening there, so I try to preserve a certain humility (as little as it may be in evidence on occasion) that in fact I can know anything for sure about events so recent."

You must read very few things regarding progress, since even the people running the show are admitting we're not getting anywhere.

supertaster: "...it's also one of the big reasons very few people are able to engage in constructive debate today, as neither debater--usually sticking to the same sources of clockwise or counterclockwise spin (msnbc, cnn, foxnews)--knows anything concrete about the other side of the issue..."

I think the reason people are so ill-informed is because of all the tabloid junk flooding non-cable news outlets. [Anna Nicole Smith, anyone?] The debaters might not have all the facts, but at least they deal with real issues.

Anyway, regarding the article:

“Like her or not, one of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued — and accepted — role of sexism in American life, particularly in the media,” Ms. Couric said. [Of course, she should know, being one of the highest-paid reporters still around spreading Bush propaganda, while a professional like Dan Rather gets axed for one mistake. And this is all in spite of her building a career on fluff.]

Candy Crowley, covering the campaign for CNN, said that for the most part, she did not see a drumbeat of sexism in the daily reporting, “but I certainly did see it in the commentary.” Still, Ms. Crowley said, “it was hard to know if these attacks were being made because she was a woman or because she was this woman or because, for a long time, she was the front-runner.”

How about the fact that they were being made because she was a candidate running for President and thus was expected to prove she was as good as anyone else, just like anyone else?

'“The media took a very sexist approach to Senator Clinton’s campaign,” Mr. Dean said in a recent interview.
“It’s pretty appalling,” he said, adding that the issue resonates because Mrs. Clinton “got treated the way a lot of women got treated their whole lives.” Mr. Dean and others are now calling for a “national discussion” of sexism.'

No one complained of discrimination against Dean, because of some stupid sound-bite of him roaring.

"Mrs. Clinton may have begun that discussion in her concession speech on Saturday when she said that women deserve equal respect, along with equal pay, and that “there are no acceptable prejudices in the 21st century in our country.” She was referring to what emerged as conventional wisdom during the campaign that racism is no longer tolerated in America, but sexism is."

Funny that she brings up the "we're all equal" card now, when she was race-baiting the entire time.

RE: Misc pundit comments.

Ok, those went too far, but she still managed to get a free pass when she did debates; and those are really what count during elections. Not necessarily in what the candidate says, but in how they say it.

"Many in the news media say it is important to look at the coverage of Mrs. Clinton in the context of the coverage of Mr. Obama. While hers was frequently positive, his was even more so — even “euphoric,” said Mr. Rieder of American Journalism Review. That may have added to the impression that the Clinton coverage was negative, he said."

It's not that Obama came off more energetic; it's that he showed more flexibility. Hillary came off entrenched, and rather than breaking out of that image, she embraced it.

“How do we deal with the media who many, many people feel compounded the missteps by the campaign and robbed her of any shot she might have had at the nomination?” Ms. Black said. [Did the media have anything to do with Hillary refusing to apologize for her war vote?]

"NOW is starting a campaign to highlight its “Media Hall of Shame,” an online project in which it points to examples of sexist language."

Are they going to start with "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"?

comment #25

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

"Mgmax: "which often as not is total bullshit, or at least easily hyped (McCAIN VOTED AGAINST THE TROOPS!!!! OBAMA'S PREACHER SAID GOD DAMN AMERICA!!!!!!)"

The first one isn't bs."

And the second one's on tape.

And you're a maroon.

comment #26

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

"You must read very few things regarding progress"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/31/AR2008053101927.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/opinion/14thu2.html

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/11481

http://michaelyon-online.com

Start there.

comment #27

CinemaPhreek says ...

Congrats, you found EDITORIALS that supported your position. Excellent journalistic source.

comment #28

Edward says ...

There are going to be tens of millions of pissed off people when their analogue TV is shut off.

comment #29

lipranzer says ...

Can I just say how ironic it is that the photo accompanying a piece about the bias, or lack thereof, against Hillary Clinton in the coverage of the Democratic campaign series is, in essence, a boob shot?

Carry on.

comment #30

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

"Congrats, you found EDITORIALS that supported your position. Excellent journalistic source."

I'll remember that you said not to believe anything that comes from the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

And of course, Michael Yon could not be further from what you describe, so you ignore him.

comment #31

Indeed says ...

I get all of my info from the internet, which is too bad because I use dialup.

Speaking of which, I'm getting some information now about some attack on Pearl Harbor. I'll keep you guys informed....

comment #32

Indeed says ...

The above was a joke, by the way.

And the fact that a lot of people don't get their info from cable news is, I think, something to rejoice about.

Although, it still doesnt explain why most people don't know anything about anything....or why people would vote for Obama or McCain.

comment #33

CinemaPhreek says ...

(rolls eyes) - Just don't have the time to teach you the difference between editorials, guest op-ed editorials and bona fide articles.

"I'll remember that you said not to believe anything that comes from.."

Getting your strawman arguments all ready ahead of time I see. But no, generally I don't go around trying to make my points by saying, "Well, according to an editorial in the blank blank blank..."

comment #34

Mgmax, le Corbeau says ...

And of course, Michael Yon could not be further from what you describe, so you ignore him.

comment #35

bb says ...

Earth to Jeff, watching cable news isn't "really paying attention".

Try reading.