CNN is indeed often terrible, and I cringe at many of their choices. But despite my initial reluctance, I watched a few of the Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown shows and found them to be incredibly high quality television. There was a show the other night where he was travelling on the Amazon (or the Congo, I can’t remember which) meeting people and exploring the culture and history there and it was fascinating. Another recent show from Libya was interesting as well.
Yeah, most of their news personalities I can’t stand anymore, although I do respect Christianne Amanpour and Fareed Zakharia. I especially can’t stand that Tom Foreman guy who always does the things with the ‘virtual spaces’, and some of them come across as sleazy and self-promoting like that Andrew Cuomo.
I far prefer to watch MSNBC for opinion journalism; especially Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. Yes I know they are biased, but they are clear about it and I feel like they are genuine people with valid informed opinions and personal integrity.
Yep, I was going to say the only good stuff on (non-cable) tv is stuff like Frontline, Bill Moyers etc. “regular” news is a horror show. Even publicly funded outlets can have issues when it comes to underwriting sponsors, but still better than corporate news.
Propaganda, advertising, consent, conditioning, increasing media consolidation over the years, grooming a distracted and apathetic audience? I’m sure there’s a professor out there somewhere who’s much smarter than myself and can drop it all on our heads in easy to understand key points. It’s not me unfortunately, but I do think this is not something we’ve asked for as educated consumers of information. We’ve been fed.
I just listen to NPR. I figure if something important happens, it’ll drift my way. I follow tech, copyright, patent and science news, read science based medicine, respectful insolence, NeuroLogica, listen to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe and The Guardian’s Science weekly. That sort of thing. I feel pretty well informed on the topics I care about. I don’t watch tv news because I find it very depressing, uninformative, and full of unstated assumptions. Short on facts, and long on commentary. And they never seem to construct valid graphs, with units and label in the right places. Like they never passed high school algebra.
I believe CNN has a rational rating of news stories that, at the outbreak of story, estimates the number of viewers the story will gather. If it is a “big” story (e.g., the Zimmerman trial), two things happen: (1) the amount of time devoted to the story is adjusted; and (2) the price per advertising minute goes up. Just like airlines have sophisticated algorithms to calculate the optimized price per seat at any given moment, I think CNN and others know exactly how to price their advertising time. The result is tabloid news.
