Are Blog Segments And Bloggers On TV Borrrrrrrrring?

“Hey, Jon Stewart must have seen TMV on MNBC’s Connected last month!!”

Slate has an item about must-watch Stewart’s bit poking fun at how several cable shows are trying to cover blogs and writer Dana Stevens agrees with him that it doesn’t make compelling TV.

Stevens first criticizes the concept of news anchors reading blogs on the air or reviewing them, then says of the bloggers themselves:

Other news segments, in which bloggers themselves are interviewed — their heads framed in tiny windows, embedded in a graphic of their own homepage — sometimes feature better commentary, but they combine, in Stewart’s words, “the visual pizzazz of a text file with the deep insight of a 90-second cable news segment.” ….Looking at a filmed image of a blog post feels about as much like reading one as glancing at a dim photocopy of a 1972 Playboy centerfold feels like having sex.

There IS a big of a conflict-of-interest on TVM commenting on this since he did a blog report on Connnected, so take these comments with that in mind:

• It’s admirable that news shows are trying to cover blogs. Blogs are a new medium. Perhaps in the long run the various shows will find a few specific guidelines for how these reports are done that can eliminate some of this criticism.
• There is a basic news dilemma here because the news/talk shows on cable want to ensure that blogs aren’t just out there in their own little world, unknown to those Americans who have a life and aren’t computer geeks (you know, those who somehow feel that what is written on the Internet may not sway the course of elections and history), but incorporated into what they present to viewers as information swirling (and blogs DO SWIRL).
• Blogs help underscore a kind of ranking of stories’ importance and prevelant opinions out there. The bloggers’ segments are perhaps more akin to when a cable news show takes a look at the headlines. It IS interesting although it’s not the debate screamfest that now marks many cable TV shows. Blog reports tend to be standard news roundups and all of them that we’ve seen have been quite sturdy.

But TMV knows how to liven it up.



If he’s invited again on another one of these cable news shows perhaps he should bring a wooden dummy that he uses in his other incarnation (which brought him here to Lansing, Michigan). A local San Diego news show actually had him start out his segment with the dummy talking.

If other bloggers on cable shows can’t find a dummy all they have to do is to invite any member of Congress.