Thursday, September 11, 2008

Fair and Balanced? No, I Touch The World With Insanity

Cable news network MSNBC has replaced Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann for hosting their elections coverage. They have been replaced by David Gregory (Represent!)

Anyways...the reason they were replaced as hosts (and they're still there, they're just commentators now), is because they were just commentators to begin with.

Really, I could've done their jobs. And I'd have done it for a lot less than they would have. Talk about fiscal responsibility.

Matthews and Olbermann are NOT journalists. That is the main point. They never were to begin with, they are not now, and they never will be impartial, fair-minded journalists. Never gonna happen.

I like Olbermann, I love watching his show; but he is not a journalist, he is an entertainer. If I wanted real news...crap, where would I go for real news?

Would I go to CNN? Home of Wolf Blitzer...whose show "Situation Room" spent three days covering the death of Anna Nicole Smith during the most violent phase of the Iraq war. Home of Campbell Brown...whose qualifications as a journalist are scarcely more apparent than yours or mine...

Olbermann and Matthews give you opinion. Joe Scarborough gives you opinion. Bill O'Reilly gives you opinion. Lou Dobbs gives you opinion. They ALL give you opinion. NONE of them are real journalists. They all have their own agendas.

Even when the cable networks try to stick to genuine news, even their presentation of that is becoming more and more dubious. I have noticed recently that CNN has picked up a dirty habit from Fox News. Yes, I have watched Fox News before. It wasn't pretty.

CNN now has these little boxes at the bottom of the screen that say "Fact:...." and then pretend to give you a fact relevant to whatever they're talking about. I hate those gimmicky things. If it's relevant, they would have told you about it in the story, when they were giving you NEWS. What they are giving you in the box at the bottom of your screen is not news; it is propaganda, just like the kind you can see in the boxes if you've watched Fox News.

The "Facts" they include are almost always slanted or biased in some way, whether it's CNN or Fox. Whether either network interviews someone, they always include a little box by the side of the person's head listing their qualifications and other useless stuff. What's that supposed to do? Make me think the person on TV is some kind of expert? CNN and Fox (MSNBC, too) always have these people who come on TV just to tell me that they're better than I am. Military experts, political experts, economic experts. And what do they tell me? Not one d*** thing. So thank you, cable network news, for giving me the delusion that I'm actually learning something of value even when you've long since ran out of actual news to go cover. (Also, the boxes at Fox are especially nauseating. For example, when they have a story about Barack Obama, a box on the bottom of the screen will say "he'll be the first President who's spent time in a Muslim country" and they always refer to him as "BHO", to emphasize his "foreignness". Most McCain supporters have good reasons to back their candidate, but FOX NEWS is flat out racist. Bottom line. I can't make this stuff up.)

Hey, maybe the networks could spend time investigating government waste or fraud. Blah. Not interesting enough to the viewers. CNN usually sounds like they decide what to cover based entirely on focus groups. It's so fake. Haven't you ever watched CNN before when they keep saying "Economy: Issue Number One"? It's like they asked people...what do you care about?

"Uhhh, I dunno. I guess gas is expensive. Let's complain about something we know nothing about and blame people for it who can't do anything about it whatsoever."

CNN needs to stop babying Americans and go cover something relevant, not just what people want to hear. Do you know what one of the purposes of media is? To inform people.

People should not be informing the media. That, as John McCain would say: that, my dear, dear friends, is a broken system.

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