Years back Chris O'Sullivan told a lot of us that he no longer watched TV news programs, finding them uninformative. He was in a position to know, having worked once for Chris Mathews. I continued to watch TV news. Then another friend, Diane, told a lot of us that she enjoyed watching Rachel Maddow--as entertainment. It wasn't really news, she said.
A few years later I think I understand what Chris and Diane were saying. I was helped, probably, by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who present news-as-comedy in the tradition of Mort Sahl. In fact, if you watch Stewart and Colbert, you will be more entertained and about as well informed as if you watch ABC or PBS news. Stewart and Colbert are less sunk in gloom than Amy Goodman and less crazy (and much less nasty) than Rush Limbaugh, an entertainer of ancient white men and the women who obey them.
Aside from a few brute facts ("Obama has been elected President"), there is no news that matters on TV. What you see is interviews with Republican and Democratic spinners, inside the Beltway rubbishy analysis (same old hands repeating one another, totally out of touch with Kansas and California), a range of views from middle to middle-right, and no grasp of why anything is happening. For example, no one seems able to explain why President Obama keeps repeating that "nothing is off the table" in our crisis with Iran. Why is he threatening a future bombing of Iran? My hope is that it is his way to stalling Israel from bombing Iran immediately. But that's just a guess. No one on TV seems to know.
Americans know little. Most of us in Mississippi don't know that Obama is a Christian. In Alabama we believe that the world is 6,000 years old. In San Francisco voters work hard to make circumcision illegal. In Sonoma a campaign against fluoride is waging, perhaps to save the endangered cavity.
Meanwhile I watch MSNBC--it is amusing.
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