alt Hacker News> The next time you catch a TV news anchor, picture them being with you in your living room instead of in the TV studio. You will instantly conclude that the person is mentally and spiritually unwell to talk and act like that.
They're two different scenarios so it's not exactly a surprise they sound different. Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.
> The voice they use to speak to the watcher is pure venom. It's an extremely angry and condescending voice, and the TV watcher is made to feel inferior to the broadcasters and therefore give attention to the "very important" things they are talking about.
I can't say I identify with that at all. I do not hear "pure venom" when I listen to a newscaster. They're usually either trying too hard to be serious or trying too hard to be lighthearted and chummy. But neither is venomous.
IMO the biggest problem with cable news is that it runs constantly. News doesn't. So they have to fill endless dead time with hyperbole. One newscast in the evening ought to be enough for anyone, really.
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The basic problem of CNN is that a person who tunes in at 5:30 pm has to get basically the same story as someone who tunes in at 7:30 pm so they have to repeat the same "news" over and over again. You could have a magazine format with lots of little documentaries about little different things that happen all over the world and you would be better "informed" in the sense of learning something but you wouldn't have as much shared experience with other viewers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bagdikian
is most famous for his book The Media Monopoly but his obscure 1971 book The Information Machines: Their Impact on Men and the Media was highly predictive of what news on the web was going to look like because he had worked for the RAND corporation and tried to sell a very unprogressive (in terms of business) media interest on the idea of online personalized news and they didn't want to make the investment.
That book has some of the most damning indictments of the concept of "news" from a McLuhanite perspective that ever been put to writing, most of all a description of how the editor of a small-town newspaper has about 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide if he wants to run it. It's a fundamental act of violence against the framework of reality to throw out 99.999% of it and the kind of "bias" that people get stuck on where people think we need an equal balance of stories that infuriate right-wingers and infuriate left-wingers.
Some are absolutely better than others when it comes to this. But I was shocked and instantly repulsed when hearing and seeing CNN at an airport after having been away from televisions for a few months.
> Same goes for anyone giving a public speech, their cadence and tone would sound bizarre if they were just say in a room with you.
Then imagine these newscasters giving a public speech in that same way. You'd think you had stepped into the quarterly meeting of psychotics planning a spree.
EDIT:
And most importantly in my living room example: That's where the TV is. If you wouldn't invite a person in the flesh and blood to your living room to behave like this, why would you invite them through your TV?
What about true crime and murder series on Netflix? Who would want to spend their evenings with a flesh and blood person in their bedroom who would go on into gory details for hours about murders and abductions? But still people invite these reptilians to their bedrooms through the TV.