Sideband #32: Cable News

Warning: This is a 100% pure foul-mouthed rant…

You’ve been warned.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to watch any of the cable news networks. I used to watch Fox just to see the other point of view, but their lies and bias were finally more than I could stomach.

CNN used to be a decent place to get real news, but they have so completely trivialized themselves as to have become useless, pointless.  Anderson Cooper makes me want to hit my head with a hammer, and Wolf Blitzer is way past his sell-by date.

Don Lemon seems to have a lot of potential; what the hell is he doing at CNN? He seems like he might be a serious news man. But he’s not enough, and they’ll either lobotomize him or he’ll get sick of being there and get a real news job.

That left MSNBC, but they’ve become the anti-Fox to the point that there’s no reason to watch them anymore. During the Obama campaign I got a bit hooked on Keith Olbermann’s show and then on Rachel Maddow, but when Olbermann was pushed out and replaced by that smug, braying jackass Lawrence O’Donnell, that was pretty much it for me.

I do like Maddow, mostly, but her earnest seriousness and clear left bias just got to be too much. O’Donnell earned a spot on my “never gonna watch this guy again” list with his idiotic diatribe about Sarah Palin’s neologism “refudiate.” I’m not fan of the utterly vapid Palin, but a supposed intellectual ought to recognize that English is a dynamic language that is constantly evolving. And proof of his blind bias is clear in that I’d bet dollars to bagels (thought I was gonna say donuts, dincha) O’Donnell never went after Stephen Colbert’s great neologism, “truthiness.”

So fuck O’Donnell and, while I’m at it, fuck Chris Matthews who loves the sound of his own voice so much he can’t ask a question without stating it three ways. His show is the epitome of talking head pointlessness. I tired of that noisy, ridiculous show almost immediately. Which leaves Maddow, and I find her just tiresome enough that not watching her is a lot easier than watching her.

(And just so we’re crystal clear: double-triple-fuck Fox and all it says, does and stands for. They are a shit-stain poisoning American politics.)

So the cable news neighborhood has completely gone to hell. The neighbor on the right is this uber-conservative freak who probably has Nazi memorabilia in his basement. The neighbor on the left is a tiresome lefty that takes themselves way too seriously, and those bums in the CNN beach house behind me seem like internet-addicted mind-addled fools.

Which leaves those funny neighbors across the street: Jon Stewart has rightfully earned the sobriquet “Most Trusted Man in America” and Stephen Colbert makes a pretty nice chaser.  (I will confess I do get tired of the Colber(t) schtick sometimes; he can really ruin a decent interview I’d otherwise enjoy.)

I just wish The Daily Show was an hour long and aired five nights a week.

But, as for the “big three,” you’re completely history with me. Don’t call, we’re done.