Maybe they wouldn’t all be going broke if they would’ve printed NEWS instead of drivel, and if they would have put NEWS on the front page, and if the NEWS had been current, and if the NEWS had been honest news and not propaganda, and if the NEWS when it were (at least somewhat) honest were not buried in the back pages, and if the NEWS would have printed folks letters to the editor that were of different political opinions than the NEWS, and if the NEWS wasn’t full of advertizing, and if the NEWS had a good comics page instead of all the crappy strips that we HATE, and if… You get the picture.

As for TV news… Uh, ditto.

@BenG – That is a scary thought!

go on, delete this comment.

I stopped watching CNN during the past election covrage, MSNBC was always too left leaning for me, and nobody here even bothers mentioning the hack-job at FOX News. I Tivo the public TV Newshour and Charlie Rose, the Sunday Talk shows, and pretty much browse Bloomberg when I can on a daily basis. I gave up on CNBC too, as the Daily Show does a better round-up of the financial news stories after all and with a bit of humor too.

So it’s still up to the print media – even though it’s online, it’s still newspaper reporters doing the stories – and, of course, Donklephant and our own discourse that we’ll have to depend on. Scary, isn’t it :-)

I struggle to account for why it is that people are attracted to button-pushing showmen masquerading as journalists. It has not surprised me for a very long time, but it continues to amaze me. Perhaps what accounts for this preference is that it’s so much easier to get mad and blame someone else than to work to construct a coherent model of an issue that incorporates the many details and variables. Yeah, that sounds right.

Most folks really don’t notice it when they are being manipulated by anger salesmen like Limbaugh, Dobbs, Colter, Moore, and so on and so on. Folks simply enjoy the release that comes from being told it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of some group of folks that are different from them. I still have not determined whether it’s more frightening to think that people like Dobbs and Colter et al are sincere, or insincere.

The blurring of the line between news information and entertainment has been going on for many years, and now infotainment is the rule. We have not, in my opinion, been well-served as a nation by this. But taken as whole, it’s hard to argue that we are not getting what we deserve, since so many of us choose to pay heed to these various cheap rage peddlers. What’s really ironic is that there’s a post up above detailing that Obama’s recent press conference was boring.

As a society, we have shown ourselves to be anti-thinking, anti-consideration, anti-hard-choices. We like simple-sounding ideas that make us feel good. We WANT people to tell us that the path ahead is clear, simple, and easy if only we are willing to designate a demon class of some type.

It’s depressing to think about.

The solution? I’ve had difficulty with that. Remove the rhetoric, discuss rationally, understand the context?

Kudos, Mr. President, for rising above the fold.

Newspapers are dying all over the country so all the TV journalists can do now is stand infront of a building somewhere and frown. But even print journalism has been dying for decades.

Stories became something to put between the ads, 30 years ago, the advertisers were dying to be next to news because people cared to read the news.

At one time, I thought apathy was the worst thing that could happen, but I was wrong. The deep, ugly partisanship driven by the political parties made news and truth immaterial; now all that matters is political allegiance. Discourse has been traded in for shouting matches.

Certainly the soft pitches and non-coverage of some news that occurred during the aftermath of 9/11 are part of what broke down my interest, but even before that I could see cracks forming.