Imagine Wolf Blitzer or Katie Couric leading with:
The Democrats forged a deal with leading Republicans today that would pass the stimulus bill that is slated to create 3.2 million jobs and provide for a badly needed build up our nations' infrastructure. The agreement between the two political parties was remarkable for it's amiability.
That's going to get people to flip over to reruns of I Dream of Jeannie on TV Land.
Rancor and friction, argument and debate are what the media ferrets out. On slow news days, the media must exacerbate some contentious issue or trigger animosity between sycophants to keep viewers.
It's hard for each of the multiple channels devoted to 24/7 news reporting to find something unique to report, so they foment acrimony between pundits to fill the time. They promote vociferous words that convey outrage when there's merely pique. They foster feigned shock and claims of egregious disregard for morality to describe what is often a tempest in a teapot.
Newsertainment is all about peevish belligerence and titillation. Any story that galvanizes the masses but circumvents gloom will get scads more coverage than anything that is savorless.
These machinations delight the masses. The chicanery of hype is much more provacative than a dry recitation of what happened in the world today. The U.S. news media relies upon sensationalizing the banal.
Consider this anecdote about hacked road signs.
Of course, the nanny state, concern trolls extolled upon the various pitfalls that could occur. (No one had a myocardial infarction or apoplexy upon being informed there were "zombies ahead".) The platitudinous news reporter duly moralized about the perpetrators of this heinous misdemeanor being pursued for suitable punishment and reassurred us that an incident like this should never occur again. (Never mind that only a few years ago we all were able to successfully negotiate around road construction without these informative road signs. We were successful despite being clueless about the road ahead.)
CNN, NBC ABC and the like find constant dudgeon in politics as well as all things intriguing or controversial. From Judicial Watch's law suit agains HRC becoming SOS to stumbling upon privacy issues with the TSA utilizing "behavior-detection officers" at the Superbowl this year in Tampa. Then there's the mind boggling case of a mother of six giving birth to octuplets. All these scintillating side stories add an ebullient distraction from our cratering economy.
The last thing* any U.S. news reporter wanted is for the argument over this stimulus bill to come to a happy medium. Having the GOP take marching orders from Rush Limbaugh is far more amusing and newsworthy or noteworthy a news item than an appraisal of Republican circumventionism. Criticizing the hypocrisy of myopic Republicans that now call themselves the champions of fiscal conservatism is not ubiquitary fare found within the MSM realm. Rather than focus on trying to find congruence or solutions for passing a stumulus bill, the news media throws gasoline on the fire by playing and replaying Rudy Giuliani removing all doubt that he truly is a horse's rear end.
The same goes for health care reform. They focus on Tom Daschle's tax paying history or pretty boy, Sanjay Gupta and his superficial understanding of public health policy instead of Daschle's substantive comprehension of the entirety of what's needed for health care reform. The media prefers to focus more on personality than do a realistic (but possibly fatiguing) assessment of what health care reforms can reasonably be expected to pass Congress. What does our government do? It focuses on preventing access to children's books instead of a realistic health concern of environmental lead contamination at out door gun ranges.
Our MSM is a travasty of unfocused energy in the pursuit of advertising dollars. Their masters hold the purse strings which endows them with the ability to pull the puppet strings of our news personalities (so that it seems as if Washington is a morass of perpetual gridlock).
The Attention Deficit Disordered MSM doesn't get it, but Don Henley does. This is from one of the Eagle's Farewell tours.