Bob_Grip's Blog

Republican Vice Presidential nominee and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin put the media on the defensive Wednesday night during her acceptance speech.

Palin told the delegates, "I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone". At that point, some on the convention floor chanted "N-B-C, N-B-C," no doubt in reference to the hostile treatment of anything Republican on MSNBC.

Picking on the press is nothing new, of course.  The media have been popular punching bags for years; just look back at Vice President Spiro Agnew's alliterative attacks on "nattering nabobs of negativism", written by William Safire who later went to work for...The New York Times.

But many things have changed since Agnew spoke those words.  One involves what we call the "news cycle".  There was a time that newspapers would be "put to bed", that is, sent to the printing presses; TV stations would end a newscast, meaning there would be no more news until the next morning or the next evening.  Anything that happened after that moment would have to be held for the next day.  During that time, some stories would die, others would be explored more thoroughly.

Then came cable and then, the internet and all bets were off.

The "maverick" of cable TV, Ted Turner launched CNN when most so-called experts thought he was crazy.  Fox News Channel followed...so did CNBC, MSNBC, etc. They proved there was an appetite for news and that viewers wanted news on their schedule, which was right now.

Economics also entered the picture.  The networks could put hundreds of crews in the field, all over the world to fill the 24 hour a day "news hole" with..real news.  But that's an expensive proposition.  Since all of the networks are owned by corporations that expect a return on investment, they started looking for new ways to cut costs and increase revenue at the same time.

Enter the role of the "commentator".  No matter what Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann or Hannity and Colmes are paid, in the long run, it is cheaper to have one or two people on the air talking for an hour, than to pay a number of news crews who have to fly to locations, eat, sleep, research and produce stories and feed them back to a central location to be distributed to fill the same amount of time. (There must be an appetite for folks like O'Reilly, since they produce high ratings for their respective networks.)

These commentators have to talk about something to fill the hours, and careful, thoughtful analysis often gets trampled by the rush to fill the time. The non-stop blabfest has fed the knee-jerk, often mean spirited atmosphere surrounding politics these days, and we are all the worse off for it.