MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, CNBC, Fox Business...
And the list, like the beat, goes on.
Here's a thing, though.
One channel in particular is actually free of political content and, yet, in that way life has of being simultaneously cruel and zany, it is where, truth and common sense be told, the whole kitsch and kaboodle of politics should be aired twenty four/seven.
We'll be right back to that channel after this brief message about today's idiot.
Fox News host Meghan McCain argued on Tuesday that Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz was gaining supporters because he was the “thinking man’s Donald Trump.”
Weekly Standard columnist Stephen Hayes opined to the hosts of Outnumbered that Cruz was getting the better of the battle between him and Trump because the billionaire was not a true conservative.
“And Ted Cruz looks like he just waking up to that fact after having tightly embraced Donald Trump,” Hayes said. “I think that’s the risk for Cruz even if I agree with him on his substantive critique of Trump.”
Host Andrea Tantaros wondered if Cruz had fought hard enough against a comprehensive immigration bill that was backed by McCain’s father, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
“That’s red meat for conservatives in Iowa,” Meghan McCain agreed. “What I think is fascinating is Donald Trump was at Liberty University yesterday, Jerry Falwell’s school, very religious school obviously. He quoted Corinthians wrong and now it’s become this meme all over the Internet.”
“Ted Cruz, in many ways, is the thinking man’s Donald Trump,” she asserted. “He’s a religious man that I think a lot of people especially in the hardcore evangelical parts of Iowa can digest as being much more religious. And I think that’s going to play really well for Ted Cruz.”
As a child of the 1950's, I can personally vouch for the fact that what is available on television in the year 2016 is, irrefutably, an embarrassment of riches.
Or, at the very least, an embarrassment.
"In my day", as age and life experience have afforded me the right to open any damn sentence with, there was on that 1950's and 60's screen, depending on area reception and/or size of antenna and/or tin foil in place on the machinery, a combined total of, at most, four, count em', four broadcast stations available for our daily perusal.
An ABC.
An NBC.
A CBS.
And a PBS.
And news, of both the local and national variety, consisted of a smattering at breakfast and a larger smattering at dinner time.
Monday through Friday.
Believe it or not, kids, the "nightly network news", even with the presence of such news icons as Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley, et al, was only a fifteen minute evening broadcast until as late as September of 1963, when CBS gave that envelope an historic shove and expanded the CBS Evening News to a ground breaking thirty minutes.
And the content of that, and all the other, news programs of the period adhered pretty respectively and religiously to the once upon a time five basics of a news story.
Who, what, when, where and why.
Admittedly, that "why" always had the potential to be a slippery slope but, trust me when I tell you that, in those days, the "why" was provided in the context of something along the lines of "the house caught fire (WHY) because a space heater was left on all night."
There wasn't even a hint of the modern day manipulation of that why business, something along the lines of, say, "the house caught fire (WHY) because a space heater was left on all night (SLIPPERY SLOPE WHY) because the family couldn't afford central heat because the father had lost his job as a result of the sluggish economy that the GOP has blamed solely and squarely on Barack Obama."\
Pretty obvious to see that if it had been allowed to go down like that in the day, the expansion from fifteen to thirty minutes would have been woefully insufficient.
Kind of like the way your local highway departments uproot your lives for six to eight months at a time putting in just one new lane when they ought to just go ahead and put in two or three.
Today, of course, there's a lot more going on than just four channels.
And that means a whole lot more space to be filled with stuff.
The aforementioned embarrassment of riches.
Hold the riches.
Which brings us back, in this episode anyway, to the wit and wisdom of Meghan McCain.
And not to pick on Meghan in particular, it's just that she's front and center today because of her comments from yesterday.
Tomorrow, two things will happen.
The sun will come out.
Bet your bottom dollar.
And there will be somebody else on some "news channel" somewhere offering up what poses as insightful, meaningful, political commentary.
Because there are way more than four channels now.
And that means a whole lot of space to be filled with stuff.
The problem with all of that, though, is that space might abhor a vacuum, but, sadly, the vacuum is neither discerning nor discriminating when it comes to what it allows itself to be filled with.
Which means that in addition to, or more aptly these days, instead of ,the crisp, tasty, fully baked professionally prepared offering of who, what, when, where and why (the good why, not the slippery slope why) of professional journalism of the 1950's and 1960's, what gets served up is the overcooked, underdone, often tasteless cacophonic casserole of opinion, agenda and bias with a sprinkle of attempted bon mots and always, always topped off with a libelous layer of bullshit.
Given all of that, it's pretty obvious, even to those untrained in the skill of programming, that opportunity is being lost by airing this pseudo-news nonsense on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, CNBC, Fox Business, etc.
And it should be running twenty four/seven, three sixty five on the channel where it belongs.
The Food Network.
Where even the hard to swallow pudding supposedly filled with proof that talking heads like Meghan McCain dish up doesn't seem so woefully out of place.
And now, the news.....
Bon appetit.
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