Please Tell Those People To Shut Up!
I started watching the Democratic Convention and kept switching channels. CNN, MSNBC and even PBS spent way too much time commenting on the main speakers, while blanking out other speakers – regular people who actually had interesting stories to tell – and I found it more and more annoying. I finally found that coverage on C-SPAN was just straight live coverage of everyone who spoke. YEA!
Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less what Chris Matthews thinks about what so and so said. I have ears and a mind and I am perfectly capable of listening to a speech and evaluating it for myself. And the same goes for all the other pundits and newscasters who seem to think we need to have everything that is said, re-said by them with their take on it added in.
Thinking for ourselves is a very American trait. It is one of the strengths that built our country. It is a basic for innovative and creative endeavors. When did we start allowing corporate owned media to tell us what to think about what is going on? Instead of reporting the news, they embroider it, exaggerate it, interpret it, and sometimes even create it.
And now they are even squabbling among themselves, on the air no less. Like we care about differences between MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and David Schuster or Olbermann and Matthews. The problem is these people take themselves way too seriously and all of them have overblown egos.
Perhaps the basis of the problem is too much on-air time. The problem has gotten progressively worse since stations like CNN and MSNBC offer 24/7 news. There is often not enough real news to fill that much broadcast time, especially since they don’t tell us much about what is going on in the rest of the world. That encourages these “personalities” to substitute speculation for facts, stir up controversy where there is none, and otherwise pass off their personal opinions as news.
Enough already! Let’s start a grass roots movement to boycott these loudmouths and insist that news broadcasts actually give us news, unbiased and factual. This is one area where so called “progress” is not a step forward. Newscasters of old did a much better job of reporting and that makes this one area where the good old days really were good.
Comments
Trish, I had exactly the same thoughts when the DNC began, and the talking heads on the cable "news" stations were bloviating on while various people, known and not known where speaking before the convention. I did the same as you, and ended up watching on C-Span so that I could hear what the important people were saying, as well as make up my own mind on what was being said.
Though I do enjoy listening to the pundits (some of the time), like you, I don't need them to tell me what others are saying. It was bad enough that these same pundits began the talking 48 hours before the convention, but saw fit to continue right on through the event. Sure there were certain speakers that were more important and they did relent long enough to let people hear, but there were a lot of things being said by the common every day people that was also a necessary part of the whole show.
When I got angry enough to write an email to MSNBC, I went online and couldn't even figure out how to send them an email. They keep the contact information pretty well hidden. As with yourself, I'm beginning to listen less and less to those pundits I've even favored in the past.
Just as a footnote I find it interesting that just about every real news service found Obama's speech thrilling, except one. Guess which one? Hint: it starts with F. Hell, even Pat Buchanan raved about the speech, saying it was the best acceptance speech he'd ever heard. Meanwhile, the day after, some pinhead on that "F" station was saying she couldn't even recall anything Obama said because she was so excited over the news about McCain's choice for VP. Ya gotta wonder why anyone listens to their nonsense, and prefers obvious bias to real information. These are the same people that want the government to tell everyone what to do concerning morality, and all the time I had thought "conservative" meant keeping government out of our lives! Silly me.
Posted by: Stephen Rose | August 30, 2008 04:42 PM
Maybe it's just me but it seems like the statements made by “regular” people often reach other regular people more than what some of the “big speakers” say. By talking over them, the pundits pretty much say, “you aren’t important and we don’t care what you have to say.” Nice message to send to we the people isn’t it!
Yes, I was amazed at how unanimous the praise was for Obama’s speech except for Fox. My new blog offers my personal ideas about why they were the exception. It seems impossible for that gang to ever acknowledge that anything Democratic might be good or even OK. For so called Christians, they sure are hateful. Wonder how they reconcile that with loving one another.
Posted by: Trish | August 30, 2008 10:19 PM