Appendicitis and Cable News
by Slamfu
So I haven’t actually sat down and watched much cable news these last 10-15 years, but from many sources such as The Daily Show I have been able to infer that as far as being sources of actual journalism they’ve gone downhill during the last two administrations. To put it mildly. I couldn’t bring myself to actually watch them because I have better things to do with my precious free time, like rip out my fingernails one by one. That changed recently.
Two weekends ago I came down with appendicitis. After a few hours in the ER, they admitted me to a pretty comfy bed, there was a TV and a remote control. Also there was a considerable amount of pain medication. Since the remote only went up and down one channel at a time, I wasn’t going anywhere for awhile, FOX News and MSNBC were adjacent to each other in the channel lineup, and I had some really good opiates in my system, I decided to watch those two stations ALL DAY. Here’s what I took away from it.
There were two major dominant stories that weekend that accounted for about half of the programing. First off was about one of the guys who was involved in the Chattanooga recruiting center shooting. Apparently one of the soldiers who was involved had used his personal sidearm in the shooting and actually hit the attacker. He was apparently in hot water because it is against base regulations to discharge your weapon there. The point of the piece was that this guy is a hero, but uptight rules lawyers are going to get him in hot water for basically shooting a terrorist.
The second major thing they talked about was Joe Biden throwing his hat in the Presidential ring. This one got even more airtime. What impact will this have on the election, how will Hillary change her message, who will Obama support, all that kitchen table kibitzing stuff. This went on for HOURS.
And here are few observations about both of these topics they spent so much time going on about. Neither one had or is likely to actually happen. Both stories are basically, as far as I could tell, something they just pulled out of their butts and were told to yammer on about for hours. Never once was a source cited in either case. Never once was any kind of an expert called in to verify if either of these things can happen. I found myself thinking that the soldier may have broken a rule about firing his gun, but I’d be pretty surprised if there wasn’t some sort of exception to that regulation if there is a crazed gunman firing at the base. Of course that question never came up, and from what I can tell exactly zero investigation was done into the matter. They had a rumor, and they ran with it. Same thing with Biden.
Essentially, as far as I can tell for 2 days, somewhere between 30-50% of their “reporting” was covering 2 unsubstantiated rumors without lifting a finger to dig any deeper. Why do that when you can just have 2-4 people sitting around a table engaging in pure speculation for hours on end? Needless to say, my opinion of cable news has dropped even further. After watching the news all day all I kept thinking, “I wonder what actually happened in the world today?”. Calling it news at all seems like a major corruption of the word itself. It took organ failure, confinement, and literally medicine to dull the pain for me to go through this research. 2 days was all I could handle. I’m surprised Jon Stewart didn’t retire years ago, but I totally get why he’s getting out of the game now. I honestly don’t know how he made it through years of this garbage without losing his mind.