JUNE 18- The collapse of the cable news concept accelerated today when NBC parked its refugee from journalism, Brian Williams, at MSNBC. Williams The Exaggerator is a perfect fit with Al Sharpton, host of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation. You will recall that in 1987 Sharpton championed Tawana Brawley’s “story of being attacked, scrawled with racial slurs, smeared with feces and left beside a road wrapped in a plastic bag….” The story was false and Sharpton and Brawley lost a defamation suit.
But the lesson is not just that corporations never feel embarrassment-- as you and I and every working journalist might have felt when we learned of Williams’ folly. The takeaway is that the networks, desperate to reverse the declining audiences of cable news channels, have no plan. They will throw any on-air “personality” at the wall of consumer indifference, hoping to catch a break.
When Ted Turner started the first 24 hour a day news channel, CNN, he created a phenomenon. I repeat, “News.” It was a magnet for viewers fascinated with journalism 24 hours a day in what we now call “real time.” After Time Warner bought Turner’s companies in 1996, CNN and its offspring, including CNN’s Headline News (which rarely reports headline news) and competitor MSNBC, devolved into repetitive shows rounding up the usual talking heads and an occasional big story. (Fox News falls into a category of its own.)
This news vacuum is being filled in part by new media, social or antisocial, riding new technologies. So when old media like MSNBC and present owner NBCUniversal complain about their fate, much of the blame falls on themselves.
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| Al Sharpton Source: MSNBC |
When Ted Turner started the first 24 hour a day news channel, CNN, he created a phenomenon. I repeat, “News.” It was a magnet for viewers fascinated with journalism 24 hours a day in what we now call “real time.” After Time Warner bought Turner’s companies in 1996, CNN and its offspring, including CNN’s Headline News (which rarely reports headline news) and competitor MSNBC, devolved into repetitive shows rounding up the usual talking heads and an occasional big story. (Fox News falls into a category of its own.)
This news vacuum is being filled in part by new media, social or antisocial, riding new technologies. So when old media like MSNBC and present owner NBCUniversal complain about their fate, much of the blame falls on themselves.
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