Don't watch the Cable News channels!

[skippy911sc]

Interesting read!
Perhaps not that bad of an idea.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/media/president-obama-says-to-stop-watching-cable-news-and-hes-right/19345459/


President Obama Says Stop Watching Cable News. And He's Right
By JEFF BERCOVICI Posted 4:30 PM 02/04/10 People, Media

On Wednesday, President Obama had something of a Howard Beale moment. Speaking to a group of Democratic senators, the President exhorted his listeners -- and, by extension, all Americans -- to break the cable news habit.

"If everybody here turned off your CNN, your Fox, just turn off the TV, MSNBC, blogs, and just go talk to folks out there, instead of being in this echo chamber where the topic is constantly politics," Obama said, things would be an awful lot better in Washington.

His appeal threatened to alienate some of his loyal supporters in the media -- MSNBC actually cut away from his remarks shortly after, with a nervous joke -- but it was dead on target.

How Cable Stole Our Brains

I've been covering the media business for a decade. Setting aside the Internet -- a big thing to set aside, I know, but hang with me for a minute -- the two biggest developments over that time have been the decline of newspapers and the growth of cable news. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Americans have been steadily getting more of their news from cable and ever less of it from papers. It doesn't take a genius to see the connection.

It used to be that cable-news viewers faced a simple choice: CNN, if you wanted your news straightforward and boring; Fox News, if you wanted to watch middle-aged white men shouting. Then MSNBC discovered its niche as the left-wing equivalent of Fox, and Headline News became HLN and started rivaling sister network CNN in the ratings.

The proliferation of options has brought with it an explosion of arguments and value judgments. Is MSNBC as far to the left as Fox is to the right? Is Fox's straight-news reporting affected by its opinion programming? Does the fact that Fox is now the most trusted cable-news network mean what it seems to? Does the fact that CNN's audience is heavily Democratic belie its claim to be nonpartisan?

Why None of It Matters

The answer to all these questions is: It doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter whether Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann is the bigger blowhard, or whether Shepard Smith is less biased than Wolf Blitzer. The fact is, if you're getting your news from cable, you're getting misinformed. You're being told things are important that aren't. You're getting a diet of stories selected primarily for their strong visuals and sensationalistic details, not for their news value. You're watching a lot of split-screen shots of people talking over each other so loudly that none can be understood.

In short: If you watch a great deal of cable news, you are making yourself stupider. Put down the remote control. Pick up a newspaper. You may not have that luxury much longer.

[T Wolf]

1. I stopped watching corporate propaganda years ago. There is nothing to be gained from

feeding that beast.

This is one area where I believe hunting permits should be issued. The media conglomerates themselves are untouchable, but the actual "people" who spout the bullshit can be targeted for "pressure" to clean up their act and stop contributing to the lies.

[Jkid]

2. This is is especially for local news.

If you watch a great deal of local tv news, you are making yourself stupider. Put down the remote control. Pick up a newspaper. You may not have that luxury much longer.

[rurallib]

7. I don't know that local newspapers are much better anymore

[Zoeisright]

3. I highly doubt that Olbermann and Maddow are lying.

Those are the only two cable news shows I watch, and I'm not going to stop.

Of course, many of the others lie and allow their guests to lie. THAT is what needs to be stopped.

[ginnyinWI]

8. it is not about lying per se.

It happens when they decide what to cover and how to spin it. If you watch carefully you can see the leftward spin. And it can be seen in the adjectives and adverbs they use to illustrate their points.

[raccoon]

19. How's that again? " you can see the leftward spin."

Most here seem to think the media is decidedly not leftist.

[ginnyinWI]

26. specifically talking about KO and TRMS

not the tv media as a whole.

[Berry Cool]

22. Daily Finance is trying to ruin Olbermann and Maddow's ratings

by trying to get people to stop watching their shows.

Look at how it implies that Keith and Billo are the same, and that MSNBC is exactly like Fox News, only liberal. (It's not, of course--and Joe Scarborough is just the start.) Chockful of false equivalencies.

This article is a trojan horse, and some of you are falling for it because it's aimed squarely at the kind of progressive person who prides himself on watching no TV because it's all crap. Ostensibly it claims to be an article about how everyone should turn off the TV and read more...and what progressive can argue with that, right? (Even I can't argue with the basic premise that people shouldn't get all their news from TV. And local TV news...that's so execrable I can't even bring myself to watch it anymore.) But its goal is really not to get you to educate yourself better or be better politically informed. Its goal is to destroy MSNBC's prime-time ratings...because Fox viewers aren't going anywhere...and then it can claim that MSNBC viewership is down and use that as an indicator that liberal and progressive views are falling out of fashion and nobody wants to hear them.

There's also a concerted effort right now in the wingnut media to get Countdown canceled for low ratings. All of a sudden, they've been exploding with stories about how bad its ratings are and it may be on the verge of cancellation. They're actively trying to bring about that which they suggest.

It's up to you to do what you want, but right now, there's nothing these people want more than for people to stop paying attention to liberal and progressive voices on TV. And they know the easiest way to do that is to appeal to the intellects of liberals who regard TV as an "idiot box" and tell them to stop watching at all.

Also, I think it's no coincidence that this article came out not long after airing of a TV event that was highly embarrassing to Republicans and to which MSNBC devoted a two-hour special.

Sure, Obama said "turn off the cable news" to the Senate Dems and that made sense. They especially NEED to get out more and talk to their constituents rather than remaining in a political echo chamber. But you need to ask yourself why those who wouldn't normally agree with Obama on anything are now saying everyone should take his advice to shut off the cable news. What they really mean is: Liberals, progressives, shut off the cable news that speaks to you. Then it will die, and we can claim victory and the popular superiority of our ideas over yours--just as we have over Air America's demise.

[ginnyinWI]

4. that's about right.

You have got to get news from at least one other source. They do tend to cover stuff that is sensational, stirs up emotions, and has simplistic themes, like "good guys against bad guys".

I do get a paper seven days a week, but I usually hear the main stories before they hit the paper. I listen to NPR and watch PBS for most of my information. Cable is just a side show and I take it for what it's worth.

There is a kind of addiction that goes along with watching a lot of cable--it's hard to look away. It's kind of like watching sports or a drama--you want to see what happens next. Or you root for your "team" and cheer when the other side loses ground.

But make no mistake--that's not being informed.

[gkhouston]

20. If you think you aren't getting spin of another kind from NPR and PBS then

you haven't been paying attention to their decline over the last several years.

[ginnyinWI]

25. well maybe a little to the left--

but that's only because reality has a leftward bias.

They're still better at informing than cable is.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

5. I always enjoy the President telling me what news to watch or not watch

[ginnyinWI]

9. well actually he was speaking to members of Congress

I don't think we need to generalize this to the public at large. He told them not to be swayed by cable news talkers--that they can't do their jobs if they are being influenced that way.

[xiamiam]

6. stopped watching tv in october..

watch rachel and keith online sometimes ..but even their shows which i love are no longer a steady diet..frontline, nova and 60 minutes are also available and I do watch those ..other than that, my life is better since the change although I must admit it took a little getting used to

I became so annoyed with being told what and who should be of interest to me...celebrity twenty somethings, celebrity pundits and politicians, lots of fabricated violence and mayhem filed under entertainment

cable news and tv in general are a big part of the dissolution and destructive tendencies of our society..culture controlled by media and the message of their owners

i'm over it

[tavalon]

13. Welcome to the club

I killed my tv ten years ago. I read a lot of online news, much of it provided here on LBN.

[frazzled]

16. That's about the time I quit watching, too

I'd been fed up since the Clinton era with the media and considered it our largest problem, but the problem has only increased 100-fold since then. I don't care if it's Fox or MSNBC or the increasingly irrelevant and laughable CNN. The vast preponderance of what is said on the so-called cable "news" programs is not news at all--it's political chit chat. It's not even important. It's either lies or partisan hacking from Fox, holographic stunts and laughably irrelevant punditry from CNN, or obsesssing more about what the right is doing than on actual news or policy from MSNBC (though, obviously I agree with them more often).

I get two newspapers a day (the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times) for news--not just political news but a range of articles about what's going on in different parts of the world, about theater and art, about business and sports-- and for the chit chat I can assimilate it all in about 5 minutes from the blogs. I can focus on my work and relax by listening to music or reading a novel or watching an old movie or some cooking show on tv. I just can't take the cable circus anymore.

[madokie]

10. For the most part I don't watch daytime cable noise

and I'm about to quite watching msnbc in the evenings too as I'm just sick and tired of all the bullshit they all spew. I get most of what one might call news via the Internet. I try to let common sense prevail so as to not be hoodwinked so much.

[NYCGirl]

11. Same writer who did the lying article about Olbermann a couple of days ago.

Wonder what Olbermann did to him to make him do this.

[Shagbark Hickory]

12. Sorry but that's mostly BS. The whitehouse would love nothing more for people to stop watching the

news and paying attention to what is going on... or more specifically... what is NOT going on in washington.

I bet they'd really love it if instead we just read whitehouse.gov and all those text message and email spams they send out constantly with their own propaganda.

The cable news is mostly entertainment. They do not do a lot of real reporting because they don't want to piss off the whitehouse but many of the opinion shows lately have been shedding light on problems with corruption. We can all turn off our tvs and pretend this shit isn't going on and we'll just keep donating money to these campaigns, ok? Yeah fuck that.

[Major Hogwash]

14. Olbermann ruled cable tv in 2004 by exposing Bush as a total fraud.

If more people would have been paying attention to him back then, we wouldn't be in the predicament we are in now.

[crikkett]

15. Even Rachel Maddow has dumbed down her show.

When she was on the radio she was a regular Amy Goodman (but funny and upbeat).
But she gets many more 'important' people on as guests now.

[quiet.american]

17. What's really interesting is that talking actual facts now makes you "far left."

Are Rachel and Keith right about everything? No. But to compare them to the network of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly is a stretch that looks like it's designed to cover's Fox's ass.

If MSNBC were truly as far to the left as FAUX is to the right, this country would be in the midst of a real-world civil war right now.

[Cirque du So-What]

18. I haven't wasted so much as a minute over the past couple of decades

watching that dreck. Any of them - MSNBC included. Even when I view occasional clips on YouTube or Crooks & Liars, they must be recommended very highly before deciding whether they're worth my time. 'OMG OMG OMG Morning Joe said something stoopid and Mika Mouse nodded her vacuous head in agreement' just doesn't cut it for me any longer. I've seen it all before, and I don't need to see so much as a single clip for validation purposes.

[xiamiam]

24. I see posts about Joe Scar...here..other than that, he is a non entity to me

Huffpo has whole sections devoted to drivel...and that is supposedly a liberal progressive site..Wading thru is easier on the net..information gets here ..quickly..still cumbersome when we've been fed so much garbage our systems require it

[OHdem10]

21. May I respectfully disagree. The Cable News Channels is where

the American Masses get their news. When you consider
the country as whole the masses do not read Newspapers.

I would say it is just as important that we know what
the masses are being told. For far to long Democrats
have given the impression that they look down on average
Americans as stupid, ignorant, clueless souls. This is
what a lot of the anger is about. Until we recognize
this we will continue to lose out in the long run.

The GOP has their base watching TV. This is why the
Media sometimes seems to play to the right. They know
the snobbish left does not watch so they are working
to get every rightie eyeball they can get.

The only way turning off the TV works is if it is organized.
Righties give the station an audience. If the program
starts offending the Righties, they turn off the TV
in a group. Tom Brokaw, once said--it is an experience
to watch all the TVs in the South for instance turn
off your channel. It is overwhelming to have your computer
system crash from overload with E-Mails from the Right.

In conclusion, an individual should read newspapers and
also watch TV so you really know what is going on in the
country.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

23. I haven't watched cable news since I dropped to basic-basic cable

over 2 years ago.

I think I would have burst a blood vessel several times if I had watched even the left-wing commentators.

TV is too immediate, too hot.

I get my news from reading.