The issue with cable news channels is…everyone can think of at least 100 different things to finish that sentence. For the past few years I have co-hosted the Sowards-Roudebush Report, which was the 2008 national award winner for collegiate talk radio.
We are biased. The difference is we aren’t called news.
My problem with 24/7 cable news is it is called news. There is no news about it. It is a couple of hours of news with twenty plus hours of opinion. This might not seem like a problem to some of you.
Let’s take a look.
An elderly woman happens to be watching the “Sean Hannity Show” on Fox News. He tells his viewers that they should not take the swine flu vaccine.
Hannity is not a doctor. He has no medical training. He doesn’t know what he is talking about. But this elderly woman knows that Fox is “fair and balanced” and it is the news. This cannot be Hannity’s opinion, it is fact. She doesn’t take the vaccine, in her case it gets severe and she dies.
After all she did get the information from the news, right?
Maybe a young man is watching the “news” with his father on CNN.
He happens to watch Lou Dobbs. This young man hears Lou Dobbs support the claim that the President of the United States is not American, he is a Kenyan, and does not have the legal right to be president.
He checks the corner of the screen. This is the news… President Obama cannot legally be president, right?
MSNBC, CNN, Fox and all of the others are liars. They are selling a product. They are selling their opinions. This wouldn’t be a problem if they weren’t legally allowed to call themselves news organizations.
Certainly people would still watch if they weren’t. Conservatives trust Hannity and Liberals trust Keith Olbermann. They would watch without news being added to the title.
The facts are clear in this matter. This isn’t an issue of censoring the “truth,” as some faux news organizations have suggested.
This is an issue of removing the lies and opinions from what is supposed to be factual news.
A stand needs to be taken to protect the integrity of the title news. Based on what the cable news networks are calling news, I could call my column news.
My column isn’t news. It is on the opinion page, it has been for nearly four years. My column is me sharing my opinions, to be agreed with or argued with by all of you. I hope in the future we might have a law that will force cable news to show the same respect to the integrity of the news.
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