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Opinions in the News

Cable News.  I watch cable news mostly.  You can tell what stations if I tell you the advertisers.  A. Insurance, life, auto, home, all.  B. Drugs, many for unusual conditions. C. Automobiles. D. Weight loss programs – where the food is mailed to you.   High profit products all, I see the same ads dozens of times, ad nauseum  These are actually common to all cable news channels.  

The content is mostly about events, polls, rumors.  Occasionally, there is actual news, like a train derails, or congress passes a bill – rare.   But this is just the filler placed between their favorite offerings, and those are  Opinions.    They come in non-dietetic quantities.  Lumping events, polls, and rumors into “news,”  fake and otherwise, we use the symbol “N.”  Symbolically, this means I/you get daily servings of OAN, or opinions about the news.  This is OK, but the stations, wanting to feed the frenzy of their viewers then move on to OAOAN, or opinions about the opinions about the news.  Sometimes, a side dish of vitriol is measured in.  If that’s not enough, we also have OAOAOAN – you guess it.  

It is endless, it is cyclic, and it’s boring.  But cheap to produce, I’m sure.  Occasionally, after they obsess for  days on one topic, they give it a rest, only for us to see it reborn a week or so later.  So, we get OAOAN, then a delay, with more of the same OAOAN occasionally updated with variations of the same talking points.

Naturally, the “O’s” above cross channel lines, with say the opinions expressed on one channel are about opinions expressed on another.  Crazy?  Yes.


It is doubtful any of these channels makes any converts to their station or to any opinion, preferring to feed an apoplectic audience roughly the same meal 24/7.  Such is the news.  No journalists need apply.  Old style journalism, like congressional compromise are relics of the past, best left to historians.  But wait, history has been infected with opinion as well, though sometimes more subtle.  It is something like an entire generation of historical literature and biography will need correction years from now. 

The tennis channel has more news, though only about tennis.  
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