OpEdNews » Sick Puppy Meets Media Beast

Support OEN
With Your
Tax-Deductible Donation

Tags for This Article:

Populum Tag Cloud Control Panel
	Fine tune your search to access content

Articles	Links
Diaries	Products
Events	All

All time
Last 6 mos
Last month
Last week
Last 24 hrs

From:
Month Day Year

To:
Month Day Year

Alphabet Popularity	Count ON Count OFF
This Level	Sub-levels

August 31, 2006 at 20:43:19

Sick Puppy Meets Media Beast

by Jeff Cohen Page 2 of 2 page(s)

www.opednews.com

SAVE FAVORITES

VIEW FAVORITES

View Ratings | Rate It

Active, informed citizens seek out (and build) independent media. They're the kind of pesky activists who intervene in FCC decisions and fight to diversify a mainstream media system that's been surrendered corruptly to a half-dozen conglomerates.

TV news is trying desperately to hold onto its audience of passive consumers: those who know everything about John Mark Karr's dinner of pate and chardonnay, and next to nothing about the court ruling that Bush's warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional.

Last night, with cable news anchors looking ridiculous over their 10-day JonBenet binge, one MSNBC host seemed to need a scapegoat. If not murder, she asked a legal expert, couldn't Karr at least be charged with "conspiracy to set off a media frenzy"?

You see, the 10-day hijacking of the airwaves was not her fault, or her bosses' fault. It was Karr's fault. . .TV's version of "the sick puppy ate my homework" excuse.

1 | 2

www.jeffcohen.org

Jeff Cohen is the founding director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College. He founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986. For years he was an on-air pundit on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC-- as well as senior producer of MSNBC's primetime Donahue show, until it was terminated three weeks before the Iraq war. This is adapted from his new book, Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.