Entry for January 23, 2008

On any given day the news is barely interesting enough to maintain someone’s interest for the shortest period of time. This is because everyday news pales in comparison to the average person’s life, is far less interesting, and rarely pertains directly to them. This leaves those in the news business trying all sorts of things in an attempt to grab the attention of viewers. No where is this more obvious than during an election season. Like eight-year-olds chasing a ball around a soccer field, organization is completely lost and the only objective is to frantically follow wherever the target may bounce.

This format only works to give fodder for the real bread and butter of the cable channel news networks. I will never quite understand the appeal of the talking heads of the infotainment world. It’s the same thing on almost all channels. A loud host talking far more they have coherent thoughts to support all to set up a fight between the in-your-face over 40 neoconservative talk show host yelling, pointing, and claiming that he’s right because everyone else is wrong while the liberal guest or co-host rolls his eyes and counters with some statement about “facts” before trailing off in exasperation once he has gotten in several shots about the conservatives view of reality and/or intelligence.

The conservative is either a pseudo-bad-ass who is against a world that won’t see reality and the liberal is someone who tries to talk over everyone, taking the moral and intellectual highroad, while simultaneously destroying his own argument. The same thing is on every channel, with the political bend coming from who the channel matches against whom and who has control over the mic.

What seems to further baffle me is that not only do these infotainers propagate the conservative and liberal stereotypes, normal people feel the need to carry on in their same vein -- as if they too need be that shallow, desperate, and one-dimensional in order to understand what it is that they are arguing. This may be the free world, but free thinking is usually in short supply.

All of this then roles back into the assault that the daily news does on our senses. The positions are assumed; the vague, leading, or horrible questions lobbed; and the waiting for any blood is sought so hungrily that everyone sits, salivating mouth in hand, waiting to be fed another morsel of mildly interesting that they can describe as the best tasting, most interesting thing that has ever been experienced. I, for one, find all of it unpalatable.