The Internet Killed The Television Star

Why are television news reporters being so nice to Senator John McCain? MediaMatters.org noted recently that McCain has been getting the red carpet treatment and softball questions on the broadcast networks, as well as cable news networks. It's shocking to see the media fawn and flatter a political candidate.

Following the November 2008 election, there may be no more broadcast television as we know it. The results of the election will throw mud in the face of the mainstream commentators.



The news media needs McCain so it can create content and justify its own existence. It's fast becoming totally irrelevant. Most viewers have enourmous quantities of information from the Internet with which to hold up against what these people are saying, yet the television personalities continue to operate under the assumption that most of their audience is stupid, has yet to adopt Internet technology, or never will.

The evolving perception of media power

Media Matters (mediamatters.org) has once again launched a campaign to squelch media pundit Chris Matthews of NBC’s cable network MSNBC for expressing his negative opinion about Senator Hillary Clinton while under the sheep’s clothing of objective journalism.

Broadcast television before Cable was so limited by time that they only had room for straight news. Through this limited capability, journalism was given its reputation.

Suddenly, cable television had so many channels that it didn’t know what to do with them so they invited experienced talent from talk radio. Talk radio talent was a good choice because now the cable news networks had to fill twenty four hours a day.

The old guard television news anchors held a firm grip on their reputations while they had a limited amount of time, but they soon faced competition from their inflammatory talk-radio-to-television-gatecrashers.

The public perception is that what was once considered straight news has now become stained by opinion journalism. The truth is that most information is biased. All news was only covered by one perspective, that which was allowed by the gatekeepers.

We live in an era now where we must understand that an opinion is an opinion, and we can sit back and say “Well, he has his opinion and that’s okay.” A few years ago, during the period between the invention of cable and the birth of the Internet, most of us would still have a problem with that statement.

Today, I have my own media outlet. In fact, I have at least eight. If there was a topic that interested me, I would look it up, find as many differing positions as I could on it, and decide for myself. If it’s interesting enough I might write about it?

So who gives a rat’s ass about Chris Matthews or what he’s saying about Hillary?