Hello my name is Bill, I am a cable news junkie. Recovering. I fell off the wagon a year ago and started watching hours and hours of cable news beginning with Keith Olbermann, then Rachel Maddow, then Chris Matthews, then Lawrence O'Donnell. Some nights I watched three hours of straight talk with the same topics regurgitated on every show but I didn't care. Hell, I was such a junkie I switched to Fox and watched The Factor and Sean Hannity during commercial breaks. Talk about addicted.
But I am back on the wagon and I have gone cold turkey. I have to say it has not been hard this time around. I don't know what happened, but suddenly I just didnt' care. I just couldn't buy off on Rachel's impassioned carefully researched, fully felt, emphatically delivered diatribes on why don't ask don't tell should be abolished and why it wasnt' happening. Maybe it is because it did happen and when she announced it on her show in a town hall meeting everyone clapped FOR HER like she was the President who had just accomplished getting rid of the policy!
Or maybe it was Keith Olbermann who I really dug and would watch sometimes two or three times a night! I just couldnt' get enough. But then I started to realize there were never any guests from the other side. And how many times can he have Eugene on from the Washington Post in his super hip glasses? Or the little guy from The Nation who stands in for him? Or Howard from Newsweek then the Huffington Post in his scarf and hipster long hair? It just began to feel regurgitated with his question at the beginning: How many of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? Um, really none of them.
Or Chris Matthews yelling at everyone and letting no one finish. Or Lawrence O'Donnell with his quirky sense of humor and his government experience allowing himself to get the last word. Or even Anderson Cooper keeping them honest with his white hair and dwarfish good looks. Don't get me wrong. I could easily fall off the wagon and go back to my old ways of watching three straight hours a night, but I think what is different this time is I started to wonder what else I could be doing with that time! And that's what really got me. Forget that it is really entertainment, that there are millions of people watching the guys on the other side, that it doesn't really matter at all because these are talk show hosts. Forget all that, here is what really got me back on the wagon and why I will never return to the cable news wasteland.
I could have probably written another novel with all the time I wasted in front of the boob tube getting riled up all night. Ouch. Now that hurts.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
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I got hooked just before Rachel got her own show--when she was just a political panelist with what I thought to be a quick grasp of the issues and the changing conversations as it went around the table. Got to know Keith then as well, had known Chris for quite a while. It was an exciting time.
I hadn't thought about it, but you are right--I am much less interested now. John Stewart stated it well in his interview with Rachel--OJ just isn't going to kill someone every day, so the mundane has to become hyped and sold as breaking news.
Good luck with the on the wagon thing. My aspirations are not so high. I'm simply trying to get laundry done and taxes started in the commercial breaks!
Rated.
Now fast foward to 1992 and that campaign when you had Carville kicking Matalin's ass for Clinton while she worked for Bush. Carville thought of the press as this voracious beast that needed to be fed news for its 24/7 cycle (as opposed to the simple 1/2 hour of but 12 years prior.) "Feed the beast, or the beast will feed on you." Was a quote of his I remember from the book they co-wrote about that 1992 campaign when they inexplicably fell in love and later married.
And the narrow casting allows for greater polarization. Don't need to appeal to a broad mass. The narrowcasting guarantees a segment. And segments get to receive news in echo chambers that validate what they believe as somehow being broadly accepted. It does a huge disservice to our discourse.
But a new style is out there on MSNBC in the form of the Morning Joe show. Yeah, Scarborough is to the right. I get it. Mika Breznyzski is to the left. Mike Barnicle is an old style, Tip O'Neil Democrat.
His big thing is civility. He had the little poindexter from the Nation on who would cede no ground, deployed the tactic of interrrupt, attack, and blame. Scarborough cut off the interview with a shake of his head and sadness saying something along the lines of "Ok, I gave you your chance, we're done here."
If you are not civil and respectful on that show, you don't get invited back. Tom Brokaw comes on. Peggy Noonan. The editor in chief of Nation (Woman, dark hair, never remember her name) Joan Walsh. Pat Buchanan in a mellow role. Zbig Brezynzski. Etc. etc. A smattering of INTELLIGENT and THOUGHTFUL pols and they allow the answers to go on as needed for nuance and explanation.
Try it out.
I click off as soon as Dylan Ratigan shows, as his populist class warfare fervor and need to interrupt and get the last word sickens me. Then I flip to cable music and get going with the day.
Good post!
I used to switch to Fox at commercials too and that was just enough to sicken me and flood me with relief when I switched back. All done with that now completely.
It was the election of Obama that made me a news junkie. Now I just want some comic relief to get me thru the next two years.
I appreciate Rachel's research and her debunking, but there's too much trash talk on all of them. Jon Stewart was right.
I haven't gone cold turkey yet, but it's coming. Can't handle the vitriol anymore.
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I am still waiting for live cage matches between liberals and conservatives with "two enter, one leave."
Blood for profit is already the way of this nation, I say let's put the bloodshed on live TV and let the people see the reality of the world they created.
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...we also have been known to graze over to Fox during MSNBC commercials.... and recently decided to go back to reading books and even writing books!....
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