The latest big news at CNN is that the "top kill" pumping was stopped for 16 hours without BP telling the world about it. "Rick", the idiot who does the 4 p.m. show, went on and on about how this was a heinous crime, but then brought on an expert from Tulane who said it was normal to stop for awhile and measure pressures. "Rick" then went on to ask some stupid questions that proved he knew nothing about what he was talking about. That, I don't need.
What I do need is a lot more facts and experts and a lot less "talking head" baloney. That's what news is all about. So, goodbye, CNN. I'll listen to NPR and forget about you.
5 comments:
I was going to suggest NPR until I got to the last sentence. You're already there.
And, if you don't already watch the nightly TV news on NPR, try it.
Somewhere along the line CNN decided to put the emphasis on personalities instead of content, then they compounded the error by choosing really stupid personalities.
Another pet peeve: they spend WAY too much time asking people to phone in their opinions. I could do without that.
Wow, I just realized that I have not watched any news programming for 3 years now. !!!
I do get some daily news delivered via email, and that has been enough for me while in Cambodia. Even so, I've often caught myself wondering why I feel compulsed to keep up at all.
So this is not a sarcastic question: how do we decide how much time to give to news and how much information is just too much?
I read books more and more and go to the news less and less. Two reasons. News is market driven so they go with personalities, as you point out, rather than investigative reporting (which captures attention less and is more expensive to generate). Second, books seem more capable of tracing the big patterns rather than the daily events - more signal and less noise, it seems.
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