Why are the TV "news" channels all (yes even Fox) so geared to infotainment instead of presenting the news? Well, to answer that I had to ponder how the world has changed - increasingly we are attached to technology. Today I brought that up at a meeting, about how everyone (me too) was looking at their Blackberry, and someone told about going to the movies and all the people in the audience having this faint glow on their faces during a particular scene.
We (collectively, the world, not just USA) have become increasingly dependent on cell phones, the internet, social networking, and has these things move together, so that you can use a smart phone to text scour the web and tell people where you are and what you are doing/thinking (Facebook, Yammer, Twitter, etc, etc) the attention span shrinks...we are all becoming attention deficit, like it or not.
Pandering to that, trying to stay relevant has led, IMHO, to the news channels changing from what I grew up with ( Cronkite, Frank Reynolds, Huntley-Brinkley, Howard K Smith to name a few) to what we have today- if a story lasts more than a couple of minutes, its boring and change the channel...
Me personally I like the in depth exposure, so I tend to seek out things like the Bloomberg news, or Lehrer News Hour on PBS, knowing full well they all have an angle to their reporting...at least some stories get more than 15 minutes
And while I am on the subject, lets hope that Lou Dobbs departure from CNN does not mean he will only be on the radio from now on...
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