Cable News Networks

Although it is a shameful thing to admit, I spend most lunch hours at home, playing with my dog and watching cable news. I suppose that I should be taking clients out to lunch or schmoozing with the captains of industry, or, at least, conniving with fellow attorneys. But I rarely do any of these things. My office is exactly five blocks from my home and I am so lazy that I generally drive to work, drive home at noon, and, then, make the commute to and from my work one more time daily. My dog is happy to see me at noon and I reward her enthusiasm with a treat. Then, I make myself something to eat and ease into my recliner to watch cable news. This is what old people do. Until recently, I favored MSNBC because I thought Andrea Mitchell had some gravitas and, therefore, credibility and, of course, I admired the fetching Tamron Hall, to my eyes one of the most beautiful women on TV. If Andrea or Tamron were becoming too shrill or tendentious, I would switch to Fox for a corrective view of world and political events, although the anchor for news programming around noon on that network is the abhorrent and proudly ignorant Gretchen Olson, a sublimely dumb blonde of the type apparently favored by Roger Ailes. By contrast, CNN offers the robotic and grim Wolf Blitzer, a news anchor noteworthy primarily for his wonderful name. Noontime cable network news provides a few tidbits of information embedded in a wasteland of catheter commercials and ads for emergency call-centers designed to pluck ailing senior citizens off their kitchen and bathroom floors when they have fallen -- apparently, the demographic to which I now belong. Interspersed among this depressing stuff is even more paranoid and upsetting material: elderly and minor Tv celebrities pitching silver and gold ("What's in your safe?), the withered Henry Winkler advocating the inscrutable "Reverse Mortgage" -- just yesteday didn't he play a juvenile delinquent called "the Fonz"? -- and interminable commercials featuring "our wounded warriors", limbless, disfigured, brain-damaged with shaved misshapen and battered skulls, and men in uniform angrily demanding donations on behalf of "these heroes." During this time of the day, half of each hour is devoted to commercials and so using the remote to flip between CNN,FOX, and MSNBC is a necessity -- generally, the stations stagger their ads so that, at least one of them will be broadcasting news, while the other two are promoting Viagra and anti-gas formulas along with the other commercial fodder that I have itemized to their constituencies. In the last month, I have been appalled to observe that Andrea Mitchell has been exiled to tete-a-tetes with David Gregory on Sunday's "Meet the Press" and replaced by some effete kid (Ronan somebody) who has the demeanor of a chipmunk on amphetamines. The comely Tamron Hall is gone as well -- what can possibly have happened to her? In her stead, there is another black woman but one who looks a little like Cicely Tyson in the "Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman", an allusion that, also, I am afraid dates me rather severely. In the past two weeks, all three networks have been broadcasting news about nothing other than the missing Malaysian airliner, Flight 370. What makes this comical and sinister, of course, is that there is literally no news to report on this subject. Accordingly, all three cable networks are presently spending more than 60% of their on-air time in proclaiming the news that there is no reliable news about the vanished aircraft. Each host on each network feigns concern, adopts a brooding tone, and, then, over images of a speck of something floating in the water, mournfully announces that there are no new developments in the case. This proclamation is often made to the accompaniment of a chorus of experts who speculate about the absence of any reliable news -- since each network has only a few aviation experts, mostly avuncular-looking old pilots, gents with cherubic smiles and jovial, ruddy complexions who seem almost completely brainless, CNN poaches commentators from FOX and FOX steals experts from MSNBC and the same people turn up every hour, their demeanors increasingly frayed by the requirement that they say absolutely nothing over and over again. Some of these guys seem to own only one or two presentable suits and they show up on-air in the same ties displayed the preceding day on another network and their irritation at the stupid questions to which they are required to provide non-answers is increasingly palpable, although one must acknowledge that this irritability runs a distant second to their willingness to repeat over and over again for the benefit of the camera that nothing is now known about why this plane vanished and that nothing may ever be reliable known about this tragedy and that everything to date is speculation, but, at least, they are earning honest wages by commenting on the fact that all reliable reports verify that there is nothing at all to report. As the search continues, completely fruitlessly day after day, the attention shifts from the lost pilots, one of them with a puzzling asymmetrical half-smile on his face (clearly, this could be the mark of dangerous terrorist) to such abstruse topics as Malaysian politics, doppler radar effects, military satellite technology, Indian Ocean meteorology, styles in Chinese mourning, all interspersed with geography lessons as to a part of the world unknown to almost all Americans watching these programs. The stations are locked in a perpetual feedback loop, each of them striving to report the latest absence of news more quickly than their rivals can report this rapidly developing absence of news and, as soon as one network innovates, advertising some speck of no news at all as a "breaking development", the other two networks slavishly follow suit, usually within a half-hour. For instance, this noon all three networks featured identical half-hour segments on the submarine technology necessary to locate the aircraft's pinging black box -- a somewhat premature report since no one knows where the aircraft is, let alone where in the vastness of a vast ocean it's black box might be located. There are two disheartening things about this grotesque spectacle: one is trivial, the other profound. It saddens me to see actual journalists, people like the formidable Christiane Amanpour or, even, the boyish Dennis the Menace David Gregory, forced to confront the camera and expound at length on the fact that they have nothing to report at all. The more profound and amazing aspect of this carnival of no-news is the fact that the ancient Bloodlands of the Ukraine are about to erupt into a shooting war likely to entangle all of Europe in a cataclysm that will, at least, have enormous and terrifying economic consequences, if not sequelae far more grave and deadly. Generally, three to five minutes per hour are devoted to the possible inception of World War Three in the Crimean peninsula. And closer to home, a rain-sodden slope in Snohomish County, Washington slid off the mountain, buried a small-town, a catastrophe that is both awful and remarkably picturesque, the great pale gouge of the landslide like a suppurating open wound in the tapestry of evergreens and mountain meadows, a thread of glacial blue river dammed by this battering ram of mud and flooding the land nearby. As I write these words, 175 people are missing in upstate Washington, probably about three hours from Seattle. FOX, CNN, and MSNBC have broadcast hundreds of hours of footage showing maps of Malaysia and vacant sea -- I haven't yet seen one minute of live-action footage from the scene of this spectacular and terrifying natural calamity near Seattle: the networks have been content to broadcast their no-news news about this home-grown disaster from what looks like an alleyway in Seattle, journalists standing on the street in a town that is not damaged in the slightest, within the odor of a Starbucks, a frieze of other journalists chatting on cell-phones but showing no apparent disposition to rush to the scene of this catastrophe. So far, the only images of the Oso, Washington disaster have been some still photographs of mud with shards of drywall sticking out of it. The crisis in Crimea is a real news story that no one wants to cover, presumably because no one knows how to think about this geo-political conundrum. The landslide in Snohomish County is a no-news story of the kind that the Cable news networks seem to favor and specialize in zealously reporting: the dead are still dead, the missing remain missing, the mountain still sits athwart the village with no sign of departing. But why isn't no-new from Washington accorded equal time with no-news from the South Indian Ocean?