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From Pine View Farm by Frank Bell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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Red, White, Blue, and Yellow, Reprise 0

Rick Steves is fed up with cable news; he suggests that television news now foments fear for funding. A snippet.

When Walter Cronkite closed the evening news by saying, “And that’s the way it is,” I believe that, to the best of journalists’ knowledge, that really was the way it was. In those days, television networks were willing to lose money on their evening news time slot to bring us the news. It was seen as their patriotic duty as good corporate citizens.

But times have changed, and now corporations have a legal responsibility to maximize short-term profits for their shareholders. They’ve started sexing up, spicing up and bloodying up the news to boost ratings. And 24/7 news channels have to amp up the shrillness to make recycled news exciting enough to watch.

In a sense, news has become entertainment masquerading as news. Now an event is not news, it’s a “crisis.”

The drek to information ratio of TV news, cable or not, is off the scale.

The last time I watched a television news show was a couple of years ago when we had (I kid you not) a white Christmas. We watched local TV News reporters standing around shocked! shocked! I tell you, that below-freezing temperatures are cold and slippery streets lead to car crashes.

At least their findings were factual.

November 11, 2014 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Drumbeats | Bookmark this post

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