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Sent to "letters@msnbc.com", Subject line: To the Editor
Dear MSNBC,
While I generally default to watching your news coverage, I thought I’d drop you a note to let you know that during yesterday’s convention coverage, I made the decision to watch C-SPAN for the remainder of the convention. I simply got too disgusted with your non-stop horse race polls, the continual replaying of McCain’s latest attack ads, and the never ending speculation of whether the “wicked witch of the west,” Hillary, was planning to destroy Obama’s convention or not.
The final straw for me was the Kennedy speech. Here we have someone who risked his life to come out to the convention. You would have thought a normal follow-up might involve asking yourself, “Gosh, why was is this so important to him? Perhaps he really cares about this Health Care stuff. Here’s how Obama’s plan differs with McCain’s…” Little did I know that the most important discussion point was actually, “How do you think Kennedy’s speech will impact the Hillary-Obama war?”
While I doubt you can do much about the coverage this year, here’s a thought to consider four years from now: If you pull some archives of the old network coverage from the pre-24/7 news days, you’ll find that occasionally during the convention, the news programs actually discussed the positions held by each of the candidates. They even went so far as to hire independent experts to provide a thorough analysis of the positions, including both the positives and pitfalls. While they certainly covered the daily horse race and latest attacks, they at least used discussions of the issues as regular change-up tactic.
Perhaps you should consider the same – why not even in the next few days if possible? While I would never suggest that the latest horse race data and juicy “slimes of the day” should be back-burnered, as they clearly are the most critical thing that every viewer truly cares about, perhaps you could consider spending 20% of the time actually discussing real issues. While I’m sure your pundit stars are bored to tears with this stuff, it is possible that someone, somewhere on the other side of the TV may still be interested in hearing the differences. I know its too late in this convention to actually hire independent experts, but perhaps you could steer a few of your hourly “sliming surrogate” battles to discuss specific positions instead of their usually boring diatribes on today’s current slime.
Just my two cents.
Signed...
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