Why I don’t watch MSNBC
March 19, 2013 2 Comments
If I want smart political opinion, you all know where I go to for that. I don’t need a bunch of opinion from an ostensible news network. From a recent Pew study:
In this regard, one could say that MSNBC is “worse” than Fox News. But what I would argue makes Fox so bad, is that their “news” operation is so heavily infected with their values of promoting the Republican party. I don’t know that the same can be said of MSNBC on the flip side.
About Steve Greene
Fully Myelinated 
I know that there is a lot of opinion expressed in MSNBC stories, but I am confused by the criteria used by Pew to determine whether a story is opinion or factual reporting. Here’s the footnote that explains the criteria, which doesn’t help me:
“An individual story was considered commentary or opinion if 25% of the time if that story included opinionated statements. Otherwise, the story was coded for being a factual reported piece.”
Also, what if the “facts” are not really facts? Fox News has the most misinformed audience. I don’t consider that fact irrelevant. Fox makes up stuff and reports it as fact.
I watch MSNBC (mainly Chris Matthews). I know what I’m getting (mostly Chris Matthews’ opinions regardless of what the guest says), but it is fun to watch as a diversion. Perhaps I’m shallow, but sometimes I just want to hear the Republicans get pounded.
Also, note that MSNBC is gaining viewers in prime time while CNN is losing viewers and Fox News’ audience is stagnant.
BTW, I really watch Jon Stewart to get the news, because ABC, with which I most familiar, is more about weather and human interest stories now.
I like to listen to Rachel Maddow’s show on podcast. But I don’t listen to her for ‘news’. It’s entertainment. I don’t like to watch any TV news. They spend half the time just making small talk and interacting with each other. They do this on purpose because they’ve been told people tune in more to ‘news shows’ that do. TV news has become sanitized, socialized and spamified. It doesn’t taste very good, it’s really not good for you but some fool is going to consume it.
At the end of the day, on TV, the difference between good news and bad news is not very great. Television is simply not a good source for information. You can only get the most obvious headlines and little to no detail which is most often the most important thing. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
If you have a 60 minute broadcast, probably at least 20 minutes is commercials. 5 minutes is small talk. 5 minutes is on fluff stories. 5 minutes is on feel good stories. 5 minutes is promos for the last ‘hook’ story. (The story they say is coming right up, but they always leave it until the second to last story). We have, at best, 20 minutes left to educate the masses. Probably 10 minutes of that will be spent on a story which everyone has heard already, know everything they are going to say, but they are going to say it all anyways. For instance, a new Pope has been chosen. (Cue two minutes of video of a chimney) Perhaps, if you are fortunate you might get 10 minutes of fresh news. You might wind up with 5 of those minutes on sports. Or a sports star or celebrity getting in trouble. And there goes all the time.
An almost total waste of my time. Local stations don’t spend time on important news because it’s often about influential people or companies and they don’t want to peeve off important people, or lose possible advertizing revenue. They also don’t want to push stories that conflict with most peoples built in prejudices, because then the audience won’t watch. Such as a story suggesting ‘birthers’ are not quite right. Or the war on drugs is a complete failure. I find it somewhat annoying when there is a drug story, a smuggler caught, a grow-op found, and the announcers look into the camera, sad and angry and go “tsk, tsk, tsk”, never bringing up the 99 percent of the other smugglers or grow-ops that won’t get caught, the crowded prisons, and the way the war on drugs warps the society just as much as the drugs do. No, you can’t do that. It could affect ratings. Ratings effect ad pay. So they steer away from controversy. They only start showing these stories after the stories are no longer the minority viewpoint. Which is really the exact opposite of what is required in a healthy democracy.
No, no TV news for me, thank you. But I might be a little, ah,