The Day That TV News Died

New Chris Hedges:

The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.

It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in television and advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.

More here.

Hedges pegs the death of TV news to the day MSNBC consciously fired Donahue for being anti-war.  And that was certainly a watershed event.  But the industry had been headed in that direction for at least a decade.  I would personally assert whatever point it was in the 1980s when media corporations decided that the news ought to make a profit instead of being offered as a public service.  From that point on, it all just got fluffier and fluffier, ever more sensationalistic, ever more simplified.  Of course, even before that, one could clearly see the corporate influence on television news product--there have always been forbidden topics and ideas on TV news.  But whatever semblance of objectivity there was, whatever mission existed previously to inform the nation's citizens on important issues of the day, that all started to decline when the news shifted from being informational to being entertainment.

That is, if the news wasn't dead before the firing of Donahue, it was certainly on life support for a very long time.

But yeah, it's all a joke now.  I mean, I like Rachel Maddow and all that, but even she plays by corporate rules, even she offers the Democratic Party's version of liberalism, a sort of inoffensive "liberal lite," one that might take on a particular corporation or business figure or wealthy campaign donor, but never questions the system in its totality, never really puts the dots together in a compelling and meaningful way.  Indeed, Maddow's overall message is that the system has some flaws, not that it's completely corrupt and broken.  She, too, is a salesman for the corporate state.  And she's compensated for it quite well, thank you very much.

If you think you know what's going on because you watch MSNBC, you're sadly wrong.

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