Mawkish CNN tactics during Wartime

Reason number 213854 why I'm currently glad I have no TV access.

there's an elment of Ted Rall's mocking the 9/11 widows to Alex's post, but I will agree that the tv news routine of 'let's gawk at the POW/war casualty's family but be ultraserious so we can' pretend we're not gawking' is disgusting and tedious (exactly what 'news' is being imparted anyway?). Didn't any of these assholes see Die Hard? Where's Bonnie Bedelia when you need her? Anyhow, from the New Yorker's coverage of da coverage - "The reporters in the field are doing the best they can, and they deserve credit for trying to keep us informed under incredibly difficult and dangerous conditions. (And let’s hear it for their mostly unsung cameramen.) But, back here at home, it’s amateur hour too much of the time: when you hear a young CNN reporter ask the father of a P.O.W. to describe the soldier’s “relationship with his children”—who are two years old and five months old—and then ask him, “Is it, like, you’re going to be sitting by the phone?,” you are, like, glad that there are still people over fifty in the news business, who have some gravity and a grasp of grammar."

TV's been good for 'the graphics' I guess, but any actual news about the war I've gotten from print or radio. I'm hardly a big NPR fan - see elsewhere on ILx for proof of that - but I'll get more information and semi-cogent analysis in twenty minutes from them then I will in three hours from CNN (who, to be fair, are much better than their cable competition, and only bettered I'd argue by ABC).

Please, in all sincerity, don't ever compare me to Ted Rall again. Thanks.

haha! they had a thing in the new Rolling Stone (I know, I know - I was at the grocery store, and hey, someone else here WRITES for them so don't look at me) - the cool issue with Lisa Marie Presley on the cover cuz she's so cool - they had a bunch of your more outspoken/poli-edgy cartoonists, alt-weakly murderer's row, Aaron McGruder, the Get Ur War On guy, with the actual photos of the cartoonists - Tom Tomorrow looks like one of those lizard people from Land of the Lost, but Ted Rall didn't looked considerable more, uh, suburban non-geek than I thought he would. I always pictured some sort of Steve Albini or Jim DeRogatis revelation, where when you see their picture you think 'well that is explains it'.

Look out, James, Ted Rall roams the internet looking for slander to get litigious about. Don't join Danny Hellman (a thousand times funnier and a better artist by light years) in that predicament.

Sue me jack!

Does anyone want a TV? It's only 19 inches and about eight years old but it works fine. The remote is intact except the power button doesn't work, so you have to run up to the screen to turn the thing off and on. It's cable ready.

I'm going to use 'poli-edgy' in all conversations now...

This sort of thing does indeed bug all hell out of me. I don't consider it "news" how the wives of servicemen feel, because I can well imagine how they feel: they're fucking scared and lonely but trying their best to pull through, is my far-fetched guess. I want to hear things like every damned detail I can get on what the Turks are doing up north, or at least some form of information I couldn't just make up pretty accurately in my head.

The news media's necessity to show interviewees' individual pain "live at 11" makes me ill. That level of pseudo-sentimentality is seriously unnecessary. One of the reasons I didn't miss cable while I was recently on vacation.