April 2, 2008

Cable News: One Giant Muckheap

I love cable news, but it's broken. (Mitt Romney would say it's "fundamentally broken." Ah, Mitt, can I plug some of your extra wives?) It needs a fixer—like Mr. Wolfe.

CNN skews left. Fox News skews right; "fair and balanced" is such a con job. MSNBC skews, oh who cares about that hanging-by-a-thread, excremental network? Headline News is trivial.

Errors and homophones litter the tickers. Graphics and color schemes are garish. Men wear shiny monochrome ties. Talking heads use big words like "inexorably," "sectarian," and "Zimbabwe." Stylists and cosmeticians excessively preen Brit Hume, Anderson Cooper, Nancy Grace, Keith Olbermann, and their otherwise average-looking ilk.

Anchors try to sound competent and informed. They segue painfully between stories. They're powerless against "hard" commercial breaks. They seem to care and wrongfully assume that they're still cool on some level. They're respectful to guests. Why?

New female hires are mostly lip-glossed, hot-as-Hades airheads who wear short skirts and cross and uncross their legs so often that it seems as if it's a contractual obligation. It's a small miracle that some of these twits can even read the teleprompters.

New male hires are mostly fit Caucasian tools with dorky haircuts, blindingly white teeth, forced smiles, erectile dysfunction (You're telling me that Bret Baier doesn't have a saggy noodle?), and pitiful senses of humor.

As a mid-twentysomething, I've had it with these decrepit newspeople in their suits. They may reach the Me Generation and those older than that, but their overall seriousness falls damn flat with me.

CNN's flaws

Wolf Blitzer's beady eyes and pointing at camera.

Candy Crowley is a butterball who wears inordinate rouge.

Larry King is a fuzzyheaded hunchback whose "interviews" go nowhere.

The Situation Room is three hours of Obama-bashing.

Contributor James Carville's persona is the largest and most fascinating on CNN, and the network still underutilizes him and his rage.

Anderson Cooper isn't a tenth as hip as he believes.

Carol Costello's tan was so orange that I emailed them to complain that she resembled an Oompa-Loompa.

Headline News's flaws

Nancy Grace is shrill, tiresome, and anything but telegenic.

Glenn Beck is a former alcoholic who thinks that he speaks for and to the masses. He's such a clueless sap. He fabricates statistics. His name is Glenn Beck, which sounds like that of a gay pornstar. "What ratings?" is how TV execs refer to his show's numbers.

MSNBC's flaws

They haven't fired Dan Abrams.

Chris Matthews won't shave his head.

They haven't fired Dan Abrams.

Keith Olbermann is such a hair-trigger paleoliberal that he's almost as bad as Sean Hannity.

They haven't fired Dan Abrams!

Fox New Channel's flaws

Fox and Friends is three hours of meaningless, head-scratching blather. Why not call the show Fox and Dross? It has a nice ring to it.

Bill Hemmer is a phony. He's not fooling anyone. Just look at him. He has small-man syndrome.

Megyn Kelly is nearing forty and has Michael Jackson's nose. Oh, you're a lawyer? Hello? Earth to Megyn! That's irrelevant. You're on Fox News! Your life is over. Done. Goose? Cooked. Give up. And wipe that ridiculous smirk off your Botox, er, face.

Jon Scott is creepy. The Night Stalker would find him creepy.

Shepard Smith is an odd, glassy-eyed megalomaniac who seems to have an unhealthy "thing" for J.Lo.

Neil Cavuto's neck is trying to swallow his head.

Brit Hume is a cougher. "The Grapevine" is a two-minute segment that attacks the left and props up the right. His "All-Star Panel" is a dud. Special Report with Brit Hume? What's so special about it? Snores with Brit Hume.

Bill O'Reilly is a blowhard with a turkey neck. He's obsessed with Jessica's Law. (I don't have a joke for that.) He claims that he revived and brought back "bloviate" into the American lexicon. Really? Shouldn't you be as or more proud of keeping Little Debbie afloat since 1974?

Greta Van Susteren is a scientologist [sic]. I refuse to capitalize that word.

Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld is a laugh-free, inane disaster.

Fox News only treats its viewers as partial idiots but not complete idiots. This isn't helpful.

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There's room for a new cable news network—say, The SAD News Channel, aka the Sex, Alcohol, and Drugs News Channel—a network that's amateurish, cheap, unprepared, and tactless. The correspondents and anchors: bright but unskilled twentysomethings who never dress up and utter oaths and phrases like "that's queer," "this story sucks," "I hate these people," "I don't know what this story's about," "I didn't read my notes," "I don't give a shit," "We're all going to hell," "My earpiece doesn't work," "We really should have a news director," and "What's on CNN? We'll ape that." It'd be entertaining. It'd be a train wreck. It'd be no worse than what we have now, which is, categorically, nothing.

1 comment:

pT said...

Dug this, "cross and uncross their legs so often that it seems as if it's a contractual obligation". Glenn Beck would probably make a better gay pornstar than a news personality.