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| Q: What do Chris Christie and Nelson Mandela have in common? |
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| A: They both took over the news for an entire day. |
It’s been interesting to watch how
news gets made as a somewhat unwitting participant in it the last few weeks.
My first indication of this was
when I filmed my first story on unemployment and I had the misfortune of Nelson
Mandela dying the day before my story was supposed to air and the news became
blanket coverage of Nelson Mandela’s death.
My next indication has been in the
course of this fight to have unemployment benefits renewed. In the absence of
any progress being made, Chris Christie was implicated in a scandal involving
the George Washington Bridge, and then that
became the news the entire day. Not only was it the only story reported on each
program on MSNBC (a station I normally respect and agree with), but it became
the only story on the entire network,
repeated for the entirety of each program on that network, to the point where I
actually started to feel sorry
for Chris Christie!
It seems like each day, the media
decides they’re only going to report on one story that day, even though there are countless stories that need to be
reported on, and it becomes virtually impossible to find any information about
anything else. I don’t know if it’s because there’s legitimately no new
information or because they just need to fill air time any way they can, so
they stretch one particular story in order to fill it and, in many instances
(as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out in his show about Christie’s endless press
conference last night), the tough questions aren’t even being asked.
It seems like there’s been a
systematic dumbing down of the news media because, like every other industry,
they’re simply interested in hiring the cheapest person available in order to
maximize the company’s profits, even if it means putting out an inferior
product, to the point where even once-respected investigative shows like 60
Minutes are forced to retract stories on
Benghazi and the NSA.
“Breaking news” indeed!
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