As I watched the coverage of the announcement of Osama's death from CNN and Fox I came to the conclusion that cable news is obsolete. They kept repeating the same ten things over and over. I decided to see what was being said on the internet, and to no surprise it was much better. I suddenly had access to an overwhelming increase in information.
Some will say that the TV news is a bit slower, but more accurate. How many things did news channels get wrong? It was nothing more than live gossip, with not a shred of critical thinking. I am not a journalist, but I know the kind of questions journalist should ask, and they were not asking any of them.
I decided to see what conservative and liberal sights were saying. They were asking questions dealing with aspects of the story that the cable news never even attempted to address, CNN and Fox were like deer caught in the headlights. I thought about what 9-11 would have been like if we had this much social media back then.
Cable news is going the way of national print media. I think opinion shows are still a good thing, but the live news aspect is obsolete. Everyone with an internet connection has access to the same information they do. We don't need Wolf Blitzer to explain it to us, we are not five years old. We no more need cable news, than we need a nearby telegraph office.
Some have wondered what it would be like to live with dinosaurs. You don't have to wonder, just look at the living dinosaurs like Katie Couric. She thinks a Muslim sitcom like the Cosby Show would change America. Umm... Katie, the world has changed. Back then, there were three TV networks, now we have a 1,000 channels and the internet. Also, on a single hard-drive you can store every episode of 100 different TV shows. Why would I watch the Akbar Show when I could be watching a Colonel Flagg episode of M*A*S*H? Even the most popular TV shows today, get a fraction of what poorly rated shows of the 80's received. Good luck finding someone as talented as Bill Cosby.
People in the old media don't get it. We are witnessing the death of print media on a national level. I think it will survive on a local level for some time, but on a national level it is dying. We are starting to see the same thing with TV news.
One other aspect of all this; we are not buying it anymore. Twenty years ago the TV news would have told us that dumping the body was done to be sensitive to Islamic customs. Now we can instantly research if it was in accordance with Islamic customs or not. Before most people had no way of knowing if the news was factual, or a propaganda spin. We are finding out that much of our history is a lie. We are finding out that much of our news is nothing more than propaganda.
I'm done with TV news.
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