I’m a firm believer that the institutions of society should be independent from one another; each institution that becomes too entwined with another isn’t doing justice to its primary role. Watching the Sunday morning news shows, I discovered another example of the damage caused by lack of this independence.
I was watching Alex Witt on MSNBC News Live Sunday morning and the next story up was another report about the Olympics. I flipped over to CNN because I’ve been getting annoyed with MSNBC pimping NBC’s coverage of the Olympics on their news channel.
Over on CNN’s Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz, the subject was about FOX News crossing boundaries. FOX had covered Glenn Beck‘s speech at CPAC live on their network. Since I had just flipped from MSNBC pimping one of their shows, I thought here is another example of a cable network (FOX) pimping one of their shows (Glenn Beck).
I watch the rest of Reliable Sources until State of the Union with Candy Crowley comes on. Candy Crowley starts the show out by holding an upcoming cover of Time magazine. The Time cover was the subject for State of the Union. CNN and Time magazine are both owned by Time Warner. In other words, here is CNN pimping Time magazine.
Twenty minutes of channel flipping really brought home all the complaints I’ve heard for years about cable news being too corporate. They all claim to be impartial and unbiased, but boundaries of independent reporting are gone and their shows have turned into commercials for other arms of their corporation.
I don’t want to search the internet for each story cable news reports on to find out what connection the channel has to the subject they are reporting on. If there is anyone out there willing to start a completely independent cable news channel, you got at least one customer who will tune in to watch.
