But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Great things are happening at CNN

Not that this was a bastion of liberal reporting or even fair reporting, but these new guys are a bit much. I mean, someone needs to tell CNN that they still have Anderson Cooper on the air. He hosted "The Mole" on ABC, which was cut mid-season. How bad does a reality show have to be if it gets cut before they air the whole season, which was already taped using "actors" that don't get paid?

Anyways, the new guys at CNN are J.C. Watts, Bill Bennett, and Glenn Beck. I don't know much about Watts except that he is a Republican and was a leader in Bush's faith-based initiatives and I really have nothing against Conservatives generally. However, these other two ass-clowns are bad news. Bennett said on his radio show last year "it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime ... you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Whether or not he was basing this on the theory that the crime rate has gone down since abortion was legal (theory proposed in Freakonomics, whose authors are really funny) this is a pretty dumbass thing to say. (Bennett did say that this would be a horrible thing to do). The third party in this "Axis of Evil" is Glenn Beck who said "this is horrible to say, and I wonder if I'm alone in this, you know it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families?" No shit. Here's the clip if you want to hear it with your own ears. The answer, Glen, is "yes, you are alone in this." Well, at least it took him a year to hate the 9-11 victims because he went on to say that he grew to hate the Katrina victims faster. Now, how do you say that and still have a job?

And, on last night's Larry King there was a guest that more or less said that Matthew Shephard was partly responsible for his own death because he hung out at gay bars. In case you don't remember Matthew Shephard, he was the gay man abducted from a bar in Wyoming, tied to a fence, beaten and tortured, and left for 18 hours until he was found by a cyclist. He died 5 days later. Yeah, that was definitely his fault.

In any case, I would probably be more bothered by this if I thought that any TV news show was worth anything. I mean, O'Reilly and Hannity are outright entertaining, but they often turn into infotainment like A Current Affair on most nights.

Well, that's my rant for the evening. Time for bed.

(Ed.'s note: I feel safe using Axis of Evil since Bush used it referring to Iran, who we had improving relations with at the time - I guess that's bad news for Watts)

1 comment:

Pete said...

I used to think of CNN as a gold standard for News until I started watching it on slow news days. They're effort to make non-stories into stories is blatant and ridiculous. The 24 hour news cylce is ruining news and turning it into entertainment.