On The Radio . . . Whoa Whoa Whoa, On The Radio
So I have a Sirius satellite radio. I am an unashamed fan of Howard Stern and there's no way he was moving to satellite without me.
There's lots of channels on Sirius other than Stern, of course. Tonite on the way home from work I happened to tune over to "Talk Left" and "Talk Right". The Left channel was in commercial, so I went on to Right.
The voice sounded familiar. Eerily familiar.
Turns out it was Jerry Doyle. Doyle is perhaps best known for his character Michael Garibaldi on the cult TV show Babylon 5. He also ran for the U.S House of Representatives for California's 24th District.
Anyway. Altho Doyle was on "Talk Right", the snippet of the show I heard didn't seem Right or Left. He was talking about the way America is distracted from things that should be important (he mentioned Able Danger specifically) by trivial matters like the Entwhistle murder case or Michael Jackson's latest shenanigans. And it got me to thinking . . .
He's right. The media is in a feeding frenzy over the Dick Cheney shooting accident non-event. When it isn't that it's Entwhistle. Or Jackson. Or Madonna. Or . . . well, name the unimportant story of the moment.
We're not being served by our media. Especially by our "news" media. The void is allowing the rise of blogs, to be sure, but the blogosphere is a realm suffused with hysterical bloviating on both sides of the spectrum. There's some decent reporting going on, but the bias is off the dial.
It's television mainly at fault, I think. TV's twenty-four hour news cycle is a relentless monster devouring all before it. But it's also a very superficial medium with a short attention span. Driven by ratings, which aren't even particularly accurate.
This post is a hasty one. I wanted to get it down before I lost the train of thought. More later, I think.
There's lots of channels on Sirius other than Stern, of course. Tonite on the way home from work I happened to tune over to "Talk Left" and "Talk Right". The Left channel was in commercial, so I went on to Right.
The voice sounded familiar. Eerily familiar.
Turns out it was Jerry Doyle. Doyle is perhaps best known for his character Michael Garibaldi on the cult TV show Babylon 5. He also ran for the U.S House of Representatives for California's 24th District.
Anyway. Altho Doyle was on "Talk Right", the snippet of the show I heard didn't seem Right or Left. He was talking about the way America is distracted from things that should be important (he mentioned Able Danger specifically) by trivial matters like the Entwhistle murder case or Michael Jackson's latest shenanigans. And it got me to thinking . . .
He's right. The media is in a feeding frenzy over the Dick Cheney shooting accident non-event. When it isn't that it's Entwhistle. Or Jackson. Or Madonna. Or . . . well, name the unimportant story of the moment.
We're not being served by our media. Especially by our "news" media. The void is allowing the rise of blogs, to be sure, but the blogosphere is a realm suffused with hysterical bloviating on both sides of the spectrum. There's some decent reporting going on, but the bias is off the dial.
It's television mainly at fault, I think. TV's twenty-four hour news cycle is a relentless monster devouring all before it. But it's also a very superficial medium with a short attention span. Driven by ratings, which aren't even particularly accurate.
This post is a hasty one. I wanted to get it down before I lost the train of thought. More later, I think.
posted by Lanz at 6:28 PM
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