Are The Talking Heads On The Cable News Shows Ignoring The Elephant In The Room By.....

[global1]

not acknowledging that Trump has escalated this because it takes 'impeachment' of the front page and benefits Trump? How convenient that this has happened right now. One doesn't need a college degree to realize that this whole thing has benefited Trump and creates a diversion/distraction. This whole thing is contrived and looks like a major set-up.

[Kaleva]

1. You really think our leaders in Congress are going to be so easily distracted?

[Arkansas Granny]

3. Not our Democratic leaders, but there is a portion of the general public that will be.

[Kaleva]

11. Going by the number of threads here, one could say that DUers are distracted.

It was generally agreed that the Senate will not convict Trump before this happened and that, IMHO, will remain to be the case. Regardless of if the public is distracted or not.

[atreides1]

5. It's not Congress that worries me

This wasn't for Congress...this was to stir up his base...FOX "journalist" Stuart Varney has already broached the subject of not impeaching the president in case of war...

[BKDem]

9. Yes, Stuart Varney is the expert on this.

He is always so fair and level-headed. And his formerly gray hair looks so distinguished.

[Kaleva]

12. It was very unlikely that the Senate was going to convict even before this happened

[lark]

2. Andrea Mitchell (of all people) is reporting on this.

She just did a segment showing several clips where drupmpf is saying Obama will start a war with Iran to win the election. He always projects what he himself would do or is doing right then and he is 100% wagging the dog right now with no cares how many die for his personal protection project.

[UTUSN]

4. K&R for, yip yip yip!1

[apnu]

6. The talking heads are not in control of what they say

They are given instructions of what to push (Hannity for example), or flat out told to read a script (most others on cable news).

The show producers make sure the talking heads say what they are supposed to say. Station/company ownership tells producers what is and is not acceptable.

So yeah, many elephants in the room get ignored because the owner says to ignore it.

The days of actual independent journalism died decades ago. We've gone back to the Hearst era of journalism. All yellow and muckraking. No one is free of that stench today.

[brooklynite]

8. Please provide evidence that people on cable news are "flat out told to read a script"

[chia]

13. Sinclair Broadcasting

[brooklynite]

15. Sinclair is not "cable news shows" (per the OP)

Also, they've dropped those "must read" national opinion pieces, in favor of more local stories.

[pwb]

16. They got caught and dropping them won't bring me back to our local news.

They are still Sinclair Broadcasting and the news is slanted. I do watch the programming.

[chia]

17. If Sinclair's dropped them, maybe it's because they got caught.

I don't put it past them to work their pro-Trump talking points in some other way.

As for not being "cable news shows" (per the OP) I don't if they limited it to ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, MSNBC. Even if limited to only those shows then FOX has their talking points as they have all along. ABC, NBC, CBS - who knows? Just think about how long it too them to get the word "lie" out of their mouths. They've both-sided the truth under the bus. I don't expect much different from them now. MSNBC is the only outlet I'd trust at the moment and even that trust is limited. They're still a corporation, after all. This reminds me of a tweet I saw from Mike Jollett this morning:

Link to tweet

Thread unroll here:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1213110049872023552.html

[apnu]

20. So much has changed in "news" in my life time.

I'm 46. I remember when there was broadcast news, and the last days when the FCC required all license holders to reserve part of their day for "news". So much has changed since the 1970s, and I'm sure people older than me here remember further back and see even more change than I have.

Journalism is on life support right now. The FCC no longer requires licences holders to produce news. Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s. Then also the rise of cable networks and 24/hour new channels that need way more content. News print is dead. Radio is dead. The Internet happened and with all the freedom it grants, allows people to live forever in a propaganda echo chamber of their own choosing. Information is now entertainment because its profitable that way and there's no regulation to stop that. Then the rise of social media plus Youtube cranks like Alex Jones. Citizen journalism is great in concept, but really poorly produced and rushed, thus always inaccurate. Plus social media has even less regulation and less ethics and morals than this rotting monster that is traditional journalism. Now much of what mostly looks like traditional journalism and "news" are articles simply reporting on what people say on twitter and how twitter reacts to things.

Its a bewildering mess, and misinformation is easier to consume than real information. To find real information, one has to actively seek it out, verify it, and know how to filter out the propaganda that is everywhere we step. Its exhausting!

[apnu]

21. To the tweet's point.

War is easy mode journalism -- you don't have to peruse a story and all the work that goes into producing that. And it grabs everybody's attention with minimal advertising.

War and any huge disaster (usually) are the two things every news person dreams about nightly.

(I say usually, because all of Australia is on fire, people 2000 KM from the continent are breathing in the smoke from it, billions of animals are dead, and nobody seems to give a crap. WTF? Maybe its too far away from the US to be worth the effort to report when there's Trump's daily tweets to report)

My point is, journalists love easy mode events, the craft is so frigging hard, and humans are very lazy by nature.

[chia]

23. Agree with all that... we've got information overload and fatigue, and yet...

we still have to keep working to parse out the real, the partly real, and the outright fake. It's mentally exhausting.

[apnu]

19. I studied and worked in journalism in a previous life

I'm playing loose with the term. I'm talking about how the business of journalism works. If you know the business model, then you know what I mean. If not read on.

Ultimately, nothing is said in print, radio, or TV w/out the express permission of the media company. Hannity and Maddow live and die by the permission of Fox and MSNBC, displease the owner, lose your job. Its that simple. The company is in full control of the content they send out, and its carefully crafted to attract advertisers and consumers. Functioning as an information organ is, and always will be, secondary in for-profit journalism. Which is, easily, 90% of the journalism market.

Going deeper...

There is a relationship of the reporter/talking head and the editor/producer and the publisher/owner of any media company. The publisher/owner calls controls what goes on or doesn't go on the air or in print. The producer/editor is middle management between the publisher/owner and the reporter/talking head.

American journalism history is littered with this. William Randolph Hearst, Rupert Murdoch, Katharine Meyer Graham (WaPo '63 to '91 w/out her the Watergate would have been killed), Edward R. Murrow (had to fight CBS to against McCarthy). Are the most famous examples but this is everywhere if you look at journalism and learn how it works, even on the most basic level.

So yeah they all are "reading a script", or rather improving one based off direction from their managers and owners in today's couch based "infotainment" shows (Janeane Garofalo's term). If they are facing the screen, alone, they are reading a teleprompter, which means there's a script.

Don't think for a moment that Maddow and Hannity actually write their content. They don't. They influence it but also live in their own echo chambers, but they do have some editorial power over it, maybe they ad-lib a bit when on a rant, but its not their content wholly. They didn't research, develop, and write what they read on a daily basis. They have people for that. Those people, and the talking heads themselves, serve at the permission of the publisher/owner of their media company.

Like I said its a matter of knowing how journalism and "news" works as a business. Yes they sell you the illusion that Hannity, Blitzer, Cooper, and Maddow are in control, this is a lie.

[chia]

22. Very interesting, thank you

[triron]

24. Perhaps your experience is not universal. Hard for me to believe Maddow is a puppet.

[Wellstone ruled]

14. Oh you are so right!!!

Corporate Media is not free Independent Media. The On Air Talents are just Script Readers and those Scripts are determined by the Show Producers and News Directors.

And it gets worse as you examine your Local Markets.

[brooklynite]

7. No, they're being accurate...

Trump has never shown an inclination towards strategic thinking. Just an impulsive reaction in the moment.

[Dennis Donovan]

10. Well, it's a serious situation. We hit Iran hard with this. They have no choice but to retaliate.

We're not talking seizing some tankers in the Persian Gulf. They're going to use Iraq (and the militias backed by them) as the battlefield, drawing us back into a new Iraq War.

Impeachment's still in limbo until congress comes back next Tuesday.

[Joinfortmill]

18. Most of the Talking Heads suck.

[ck4829]

25. K&R

[Hoyt]

26. Honestly, I think trump would have approved this whether he was being impeached

or not.

He’s been annoyed by Iran for awhile and his base wants action against Iran. More importantly this was a chance to excite his racist base, attempt to match Obama’s getting Bin Laden, and avoid appearing weak for not acting to thwart recent Iranian-backed attacks leading into election.

It does benefit him by taking Impeachment off front page, but he would have done it anyway.

[crickets]

27. You're not wrong.

It's as though he has a checklist and he's ticking off the accomplished outrages one by one. I expected something like this much closer to election day, though.