Looking back on the midterm coverage, it seems clear to me that the only purpose cable news served was to collect Billionaire Bucks from political ads. Cable news has become a juggernaut, dishing up red meat for an increasingly aging demographic of hungry hateful viewers.
I'm not alone in this. Esquire:
Unless a consumer prefers one piece of information repeatedly barfed into his or her face, followed by a tepid, between-the-lines discussion about decorum and personality politics, cable news has rendered itself useless to anyone genuinely interested in news unbeholden to corporate interest or the ratings intrigue of perpetual two-party gridlock.
CNN last night rolled out its Guess Who board of on-the-scene reporters and rarely cut to them, arguing instead about the optics of a Democratic loss in both houses of Congress and the politics of celebrity. Last night was about the rising stars of the GOP, the falling stars of the left, the Tea Partiers who “put shoes on” for this election, and the new farm teams in America’s governors seats.
It was the language of sports, or it was the language of Dancing With The Stars, because everything in America must be entertainment to hide that the top, increasingly, has everything else.
When you have S.E. Cupp delivering mandatory media training to Republican Senate candidates while appearing as a paid commentator on CNN, it's really time to just make them hang it up and move on to something else. MTV reinvented themselves from a music video channel into other forms of entertainment. Now it's time for the irrelevant cable news industry to do the same thing.
But what is purported CNN "analyst" S.E. Cupp doing bringing her smart-person glasses into an effort to groom candidates for one party or another, and then going back to opine on her handiwork both on the television and on the Intertoobz? And why hasn't she been fired yet? And if she had CNN's permission to do this, why haven't a couple of dozen people been fired?
Who does she think she is? George Effing Will?
Finding clear information about issues and candidates in this midterm was difficult, and I certainly didn't find it on cable television. Lots of times I went and dug it out myself. Sometimes I relied on alternatives. It was often frustrating to have to dig around in the universe of silos that exist today on the Internet, particularly when those siloes are loaded with hate talk on the right side of things.
The days of 24/7 yammering are over. When I find news and commentary from reliable sources online, I'll post it here. The time has come to support people who aren't beholden to the billionaires and their big bucks.
