No News Is No News, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo # Something I Dunno I’m In A Hotel | @MDWorld

April 28, 2014 Mike Gold 1 Comment

OK. It’s time to pick on CNN. I know, that’s sort of like kicking a microcephalic quadriplegic down the stairs, but enough is enough.

Contrary to popular belief, we do not have three cable news channels. Fox and MSNBC offer up opinion on the right and the left respectively. The former has the word “news” in its title, but that’s a lie. That’s not news, that’s opinion. The latter carefully segregates the news from the opinion shows by putting the news into brief, labeled segments hosted by a different personality in a separate studio. That’s not the news, that’s news headlines.

That leaves CNN, and CNN offers nothing.

I spent the latter half of April on the road, at pop culture conventions in Washington DC and Chicago. This means I’ve spent a decent amount of time in hotel rooms that offer little in the way of televised entertainment. I used to put on CNN to follow Earth‘s entropy. They used to do a decent job, with experienced, trained journalists. Now, CNN is all-air disaster, all the time. Literally, all the time. Their talking heads are trained broadcasters; if they have any journalistic training, they hide it nicely.

The Malaysian plane went down more than a month ago and there has been no news since the time they thought they figured out where the plane went down. CNN is still covering it as though it were a presidential assassination.

Oh, they do the news headlines, and they break away from the Malaysian story to bray about other, similar disasters – the South Korean ferry boat disaster, for example. But the only thing that differentiates CNN from Irwin Allen’s entire career is the smaller size of their budget.

CNN has filled its time with multiple stories about the Bermuda Triangle and alien abductions and how they relate to this story. They have conflated this story with teevee shows such as Lost. Their few employees with real-world reportorial street cred must be deeply embarrassed. Do you think Wolf Blitzer called The Jerusalem Post to see if he can get his old job back? I certainly hope so.

Newspapers (feel free to Google that term) have been laying off staff as if they were cows with anthrax. News magazines are coughing up blood in the corner: the new, new Newsweek is a joke. Most Internet news sites cannot tell the difference between facts and opinion, and fact checking is a lost art. No, make that an ignored art.

In order for this news junkie to get my fix, I read the Washington Post and I go to websites run by operations with bona fide credentials such as the AP and USA Today (Gannett). The smell of newsprint is nostalgia; the stench of the 24 hour news cycle clouds our minds.

Here’s a tip for those who like to be informed. When a story breaks, ignore everything you read, hear and see during the first hour or two. Nobody has the facts, nobody has checked their “facts” but the race is on to fill that 24 hour news cycle with chatter and to beat their competitors to the punch with anything they can find. As time goes by, check with reputable, reliable sources for updates but ignore those outlets that are even slightly hysterical. Check with multiple venues in order to flag contradictions.

And if you’ve got CNN on, turn it off and put on a recording of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds. It is likely to be far more accurate.