Cable News

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as Cable Television; we had an antenna on the roof, we had to get up off the couch and change the channel with a knob on the TV and only had channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and that boring channel (13). The grownups liked to watch the news, it was on a few channels at five o’clock, if you missed it, there was the six o’clock news and again at 11.

In those days, the news was part local, part international and part national, not devoting a whole lot of time to any of ‘em. They only had a half hour, so it was really just an overview. After hearing a bit about the President, Congress or Vietnam, New Yorkers might have heard about Mayor Lindsay or a mugging in Central Park; Long Islanders would watch a story of a local blue fishing tournament. That same day, the news in Iowa might have covered a story of a farmer winning a prize for one of his cows, or a fender bender between a pickup truck and a tractor on some country road. We rarely heard about a murder or a kidnaping in a different state, even though they existed, we were more isolated.  The stories of out of state crimes might have been buried in the New York Times, but just a paragraph or two, if anything at all.

Somewhere in the middle to late 1970s, Cable Television became available and we had a lot more TV. Some stations had no commercial interruptions, some had rated R films uncut, stations like MTV appeared, and then, in 1980 Ted Turner came along and introduced the Cable News Network. Suddenly, there was 24 hours of news; if it was 3AM, you couldn’t sleep and needed a good dose of mayhem, you could find the news. People were glued to CNN during Operation Dessert Storm, the reporters and anchor people became national celebrities. The OJ Simpson case was huge; Gretta van Sustern became America’s favorite legal expert. Everyone watched news, it became cool, there was more time so there were more interesting stories.

Wow, there’s actually a market for this stuff! Other 24 hour news networks started getting into the game; suddenly there was CNN, FOX, FOX Business, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg and some others. They compete by giving us what we want to hear, and all too often what we want is baloney. If one network handed us two slices of baloney, the other guys would beat them out by serving up three slices.  Thirty years after Cable News was born, we’re getting overloaded with piles of baloney.

Cable news educated quite a lot of us. Suddenly, people that never served a day in the military were “experts” because they never missed a Swartzkoff press conference; every guy with a beer in one hand and a remote control in the other thought he was the Field Marshall Rommel or General Patton, housewives were legal experts as they watched the OJ drama unfold, everyone was a Constitutional Attorney when Bush and Gore were counting votes.

Cable news was never trying to educate us or keep us informed, they just want ratings. They’ll take a case that no one would have ever heard of; a pretty, young mom is accused of killing her daughter in Florida, that’s terrible news, which equals great ratings, which equals good news for the news! They’ll feed us what they need to in order to manufacture the proper outrage for the remote control, couch potato crowd, then during the commercial breaks they’ll sell us Viagra, fabric softener and insurance. We swallow the bait hook, line and sinker. We swallow it every time.  I’m still not sure whether the news is leading the mob, the mob is leading the news or fabric softener is leading everyone. It’s probably a combination of the three, the networks take our pulse and give us what we want, and we all feed off each another, incestuous cannibalism.

How much time did CNN, FOX and MSNBC devote to Casey Anthony? In the days before Cable News, no one outside of Florida would have even heard her name.  The media bombardment influenced the trial; I doubt she would have been charged with murder one if Cable News hadn’t made her America’s favorite villain.  “What did you watch last night, ‘Two and a Half Men’ or the Casey Anthony program?”  Comedy or drama? It was force-fed to us, and it created a feeding frenzy; the DA, the defense and the judge all knew they were on the big stage. Do I look alright? Cable news is in town. Lights, camera, ACTION!

They don’t say it, but because of sensationalistic reporting, we’re led to believe that crime is worse now than it ever was (they want us to watch). That’s not true.  In 2009 we had the lowest murder rate (5 murders per 100,000 people) since 1963 (4.9 per 100,000). It spiked in 1979 to 1981 with 9.8 murders per 100,000. There are about half the murders in the US now than there were thirty years ago.  The trends in violent crime and property crime are similar. The difference is, we hear about all of it now. If a child is missing in Des Moines, Iowa, a Mom on Long Island hears about it and calls her kids in from the yard; if someone is stabbed to death on a Detroit street, people in Scranton, Pennsylvania carry pepper spray; if a husband makes his wife disappear in Youngstown, Ohio, people in West Palm Beach are glued to their Cable News; if a surfer is attacked by a shark in San Diego, people stay out of the water in Maryland. We all become Chicken Littles, the sky is always falling. What’s going on with the world? Watch television, they’ll be happy to explain it all.

We need to remember that the news isn’t there to inform us, they aren’t even there to misinform us, they’re there to sell products. That’s fine, that’s how they pay the bills, I’m a Capitalist, I don’t begrudge them for doing what they need to do to make money, but I think it’s important that news consumers remember their motive. Their job is to keep their ratings up so their commercial time is more valuable, and if that means ignoring important, but boring stories in favor of sensational, human interest stories, that’s what they’re going to do. If it means taking something relatively small and turning it into something huge, they’ll do that too. In fact, they specialize in that.

They’ll ignore Libya in favor of Casey Anthony, they’ll ignore the recent unemployment numbers in favor of Drew Peterson, they’ll ignore fifty GIs killed in Afghanistan in favor of a pretty blonde gone missing in Aruba, the story of our crashing economy will have to wait until we hear about J Lo’s divorce.

We should pay attention, it’s very important that we pay attention, but we need to separate those layers of baloney from what’s relevant and we need to remember the purpose of television networks. Their purpose is selling. We should read, watch and listen, but not to Casey and J Lo.

Every time the Fed rolls sheets of new money off on their printing presses, the money in our wallets, and the money we’ve been saving our entire lives is worth less, our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will have to account for the debt our government takes now, the rising price of gold is a sign that our monetary system is starting to fail, like every other government program, social security and medicare are in disarray and we’re fighting at least three wars. There’s plenty of things that we should be paying very close attention to, but for the most part, Cable News is still asking “Where’s Casey?” They’re only asking because we are.