Come Back To CNN, Ted

Ted Turner, the founder of the world’s first twenty-four hour news network CNN, was recently interviewed on the Bloomberg business channel about CNN and some of the other properties he once owned. In this interview – Turner said that he would love to be able to run CNN again – because he would run things a lot differently than what’ is being done now and you want to know something – I would welcome the return of Ted Turner to CNN – but it’s not going to happen.

I miss the old days of cable news. I miss being able to go to CNN and actually watch a newscast where we would actually see reporters in the field reporting the news all around the world. News reports where the reporter actually has to cover a story – get the interview with the people in the news – and put it together in a package piece to air in a news cast. And if someone blurted out some fact -- the reporter actually had to fact check what was said before they aired it. We don’t see those kind of newscasts on CNN or the other two cable news networks – MSNBC and Fox News – and we probably never will again.

Today – with few exceptions – what the cable networks call news is just non-stop talking heads and so-called experts yelling and screaming at each other hour after hour. It’s the same people each and every day bitchin’ about this and bitchin’ about that and Monday morning quarterbacking – not reporting – what’s happening in Washington every single day of the week.

I don’t care if it’s Chris Mathhews or Sean Hanniety, Glenn Beck or Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Lou Dobbs, or Bill O’Reilly – cable news viewers are getting more volume and vitriol than we are the news. Every day and every night – these “so-called news hosts” ride the same trick pony of punditry. Some are going to call Obama everything other than the President of the United States and leader of the free world; and the other guy is going tell us that if the other side wasn’t such God-fearing homophobic racists this country would be a better place to live.

I have this to say to all of them at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News: Enough is enough! All of these networks have a news slant and a news bias – it’s just that at a couple of these networks the bias is a lot more obvious – and none of them are really doing news. CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are doing “talk TV” and the talk that they’re doing is more divisive than it is informative. It’s time that all of these networks actually started to report the news of the day and quit turning the information we need to know into some screaming town hall sound bite. I’m sure if Ted Turner could come back and run his old news network – we would truly have a twenty-four hour news network – but that’s not going to happen anytime soon – and I’m sad to say – the anger and the volume on our so-called cable news networks isn’t going to go away any time soon.