...One thing that bothers me to no end is
CABLE NEWS. We have no voice in it. NONE. Someone in another diary I read said we need
AIR AMERICA TV. It's a very good observation. You could make a case that Cable News is as devoid of a Liberal perspective as Talk-Radio was.
FOXNEWS is pure propaganda & probably the closest thing this country has had to State-Television, but it is effective. It gives the other side a place to promote & "legitimize" far-right views. Republicans also use FOXNEWS to push distractions, which leads to bigger play in the larger media. A rumor that begins on DRUDGE gets repeated on Limbaugh, then "reported" on FOX. Then the other networks jump in, repeating the same rumor & making it more believable.
Then the collective Right Wing Media pounds the hell out of it. The Moonie Paper (A.K.A. The Washington Times), WSJ, NY Post, Boston Herald and others keep the story going. One other thing that makes this "cycle" infuriating is that these companies DO NOT make money. They continually lose money, but are supported by their owners to promote an ideological agenda. Maybe in a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?
So how do you fight this? Well, I had hopes that
Al Gore's impending
INdTV would try to become a new voice in Cable-News. But, The network seems to be more of a specialty channel
(a citizen news magazine), than a network that's going to be part of the News-Media coverage. I still hope that they rethink the idea & incorporate the "citizen news" idea into a larger news organization. However, that would lead to a new question...
How do you beat FOXNEWS?
...Should a Liberal network go with trying to be the best at HARD-NEWS, or with a more TABLOID style? I think it has to be a carefull mix. I know that some people think I'm crazy for saying this, but I've always thought that if you could somehow give the hour opposite to O'Reilly to Howard Stern to discuss issues, he would beat the shit out of Billy-boy. I also think that this is in someway how CNN failed. The way you beat FOXNEWS is by using "The Daily Show" & ESPN's Sportcenter as a template. Al Franken has that in his books & radio show.
Maybe this is the reason CNN is a shadow of its former self. It has lurched right in the hope of stopping the loss of conservative viewers to FOX. However, by becoming FOXNEWS-Lite, I think they've alienated longtime viewers that liked the "Hard-News" the network did in the Ted Turner Era, before AOL-TIME WARNER. The ratings would seem to support this theory. They continue to bleed viewers.
MSNBC was the first competitor to CNN, but has never had it's shit together. My feeling about this network is that they have no fucking clue as to what they're doing. They too started by being a news network back when they started in the mid 90's. However the programming is, again, designed to be a FOXNEWS-Lite. Chris Matthews views seem to go with whichever way the wind seem to be blowing. Bush is bad or good depending on which guest he has on the show, & what the polls are saying that week. Then you have the rest of the night dominated by the likes of Pat Buchanan & Joe Scarborough. The funny thing about this is, that according to Nielsen Ratings, more people probably watch "Pokemon" on a given night, than watch MSNBC or CNN's prime time schedule.
So maybe we should promote our ideas on CARTOON NETWORK?