One blog post, by Dan Gillmor, and one comment, by one of his readers. It’s all there.
From Gillmor’s blog:
Frank Rich (NY Times): This Time Bill O’Reilly Got It Right. No matter how long the overlap between Mr. Carville and Mr. Begala’s TV and campaign roles, that brand and CNN itself are now as inextricably bound to the Democrats as Fox is to the Republicans.
The network has succeeded in an impossible feat — ceding Mr. O’Reilly the moral high ground. The Bush campaign doesn’t have to enlist Fox hosts for its staff since they’re willing to whore for it without even being asked.
Comments
So, the next time the Merc runs an op-ed piece from Alexander Cockburn, it magically turns into “socialist fishwrap”?
The problem with Faux News isn’t that it has openly-partisan talk show hosts. It’s that management has blurred (some would say “erased”) the line between “news” and “commentary”.
Frankly, Faux isn’t even CNN’s real competition anymore: that role belongs to Google News, which provides the same up-to-the-minute information, with an even wider range of perspectives. Anyplace you have access to a computer.
If it remains in its current form, CNN is probably doomed to becoming a sort of “Newzak” for use in airport waiting rooms and similar PC-less venues.
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September 20, 2004 at 1:21 am
Anonymous
The first comment is brilliant. The second comment over there focuses on bias and the author is missing the point altogether. We are dealing with a cheap commercial product, not an information service such as professional journals or in-depth reporting. Bias is irrelevant to the whole discussion. There are few better people writing about the modern military than the very conservative William Lind. Competence and ethical standards are what counts.
The whole idea of getting updates on current events via TV is suspect to begin with, given the sound bite format and the emphasis on “production values”. I will be glad to see CNN die (die, you monster, die!).