News as Entertainment...an open letter to CNN (1 Viewer)

[LarryDavenport]

I have to confess I stopped watching CNN shortly after 9-11. It was just too much to take. I used to love watching Larry King, The Point, and The Spin Room. But this 24 hour day coverage of this one, albeit important story, complete with news crawl just got on my nerves.

Now I just watch about a half hour of local news, and read whatever headlines interest me on-line (Salon, NYTimes, CNN, etc.).

As far as political bias, being a little left of center myself, I never understand what people on the right mean by CNN (or the NYTimes) "obvious" leftist bias. Someone should try to write something up in the After Hour Lounge explaining it (in a way that doesn't get the thread closed in a New York minute).

FOX on the other hand (and Bill OReilly specifically) is so far right they're off the chart!

 

[Jack Briggs]

Good post, Larry--one that took some courage to write. Our television "news" services are demonstrating some of the "ugly Americanism" that so angers the rest of the world. There can be no overestimating the importance of those events from last year, but our news media are ignoring the rest of the world in the process.

And that omnipresent "news crawl" that's on both CNN and MSNBC: Is it permanent now? We must look at that as well as the damn station bugs?

PBS's The Newshour looks better all the time.

 

[Richard Kim]

I lost respect for TV journalism when networks began promoting their primetime programming on their local newscasts.