Television isn’t the medium we usually turn to for in-depth coverage, so when we flip on one of the cable networks, our expectations are appropriately low.
On rare occasions, however, there is TV news so witheringly bad, so excruciatingly empty, it makes us want to gnaw through the cable feed with our teeth in order to escape from it.
CNN’s “Inside the Blogs” segment is one such occasion.
For the last few weeks, on its afternoon show “Inside Politics,” the network has been doing a segment focused on what blogs are saying about the issue of the day. Having taken note of critics of the segment, we figured it was worth checking it out for ourselves.
Here’s what you get:
Two young female anchors sit at a desk with big computer screens in front of them. They click around the Internet to various blogs. The anchors read aloud from said blogs, highlighting the text that they’re reading as they go; hand-held cameras zoom in on the screens as the anchors read (the camera shake makes reading along difficult for anyone who isn’t immune to motion sickness).
The content itself is utterly uninteresting, just another way of forcing commentary into the tired left/right format that has poisoned the bloodstream of so much of cable news. Today it was, in summary, “RatherBiased says this about Dan Rather, and links to the Chicago Tribune! PowerLine has it as their top post right now! Now Cough says Rather is a nice guy!”
The segment fails on every conceivable level. From an informational standpoint, it’s less than useless — recycled punditry (there’s a reason why no one does a segment devoted to reading from op-ed columns in major newspapers). On a more mundane level, it’s headache-inducing. And on an aesthetic level, it’s equal to TV put on by a seventh-grade civics class — and the slow group at that.
Perhaps CNN is trying to bring blogs to a broader audience? Perhaps the network is trying to be hipper in order to attract younger viewers? Perhaps they’re trying to get “Inside Politics” mentioned on the blogs themselves? Or perhaps they’re just throwing stuff against the screen to see what sticks.
Let’s hope this segment doesn’t.
Bryan Keefer was CJR Daily’s deputy managing editor.