must-avoid TV

[[[ omigod, take three: when I attempted to post the cursed-to-the-ether post of this morning, I screwed up my theme. Here we go again. Apologies to RSS readers. ]]]

The list of reasons to ignore TV “news” gets longer by the day. First there was Fox News, whose jingoistic color scheme

has long been reason enough to surf on by.

Then there was CBS, the “Tiffany Network,” so called for its once sterling reputation. First it shamed itself by allowing Dan Rather and his pals to run roughshod over journalistic integrity (such as it is) and then it hired the know-nothingest dame from the morning side to liven things up.

Now there is the entire GE telecasting family, starting with the Mothership. Fame whore Brian Williams, not content to be the anchor of the flagship show called NBC Nightly News, where, according to Howard Kurtz, he has “gravitas” (ha ha ha HA!), also needs to feel the love from across the entire broadcasting spectrum. What I want to know is why stop with comedians and late-night TV? Why doesn’t he get into cooking with Martha? Meanwhile, does anyone even watch SNL anymore?

Moving down the GE spectrum—down to MSNBC, the lowest rung of the downscale—we’ve got the Big Bloviator, Keith Olbermann, lauded by the New York Times as the standard-bearer of the anti-Bush left.

MSNBC has marshaled behind Mr. Olbermann, who on July 3, in an eight-minute “special comment” at the close of his show, addressed President Bush directly and called on him to resign. Two months later, the channel chose Mr. Olbermann to serve as the principal host of its coverage of a major prime-time address by Mr. Bush.

If I were Olbermann, I wouldn’t rest on my laurels, because Glenn Beck, CNN’s self-described “rodeo clown,” just got himself a much, much fatter payday.

Faithful readers know that none of this surprises me—my blog is called Infotainment Rules for a reason. Namely, because as I’ve been saying for a while now, infotainment rules the airwaves. I only wish it weren’t such cruddy infotainment, because if it had a somewhat higher gloss, people might actually learn something. (As usual, the Brits, with their storytelling tradition firmly in hand, are way ahead of us on this score: they make domestic dramas about current events, like The Queen, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, and The Deal.)

Media critic and professor Steve Boriss doesn’t care how cruddy things get on the news front, though. He welcomes the trend toward the decidedly downscale, because he thinks it harkens back to the golden age of Yellow Journalism, when it was the people—with their taste for sensational and the titillating—who ruled.

Publisher Joseph Pulitzer famously solved [the hard news-soft news] dilemma by developing a formula that came to be known as “Yellow Journalism.” His papers covered the stories that the “respectable public” most wanted, but told them in sensational and titillating ways so they also appealed to the non-elites. Publisher William Randolph Hearst copied Pulitzer’s formula, then he and Pulitzer both bought newspapers in New York and slugged it out in one of the most interesting and competitive business battles in American history. …

… even though this style of journalism was mocked, it had become well-accepted and respected, accounting for about a third of all metro papers across the country. It met the needs of news consumers better than any journalism before or since.

Hey, Jules Crittenden! I love you, man. I read you every day. Thanks for linking to Boriss’s piece. But I’m feeling kind of left out over here at Infotainment Rules. I skewer the pompous, too.