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Radio & TV Talkshows

become the owners of the majority, if not all, of the currently available television and radio programming: Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), Time Warner, Disney/ABC, News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch), General Electric/NBC, Viacom and CBS (Sony). While sheer quantity of radio and TV talk shows has proliferated, the quality has not. In the areas of political journalism and investigative journalism, sensationalism, the culture of celebrity and an overzealous desire for ratings-at-any-cost have eroded integrity, disclosure and intelligent and factual discussion of real issues and problems affecting the American people and America itself. As these giants jockey with one another in a mad competition for ratings and power, it is they who direct what programming we have access to and exactly what content is or is not newsworthy in their opinion. What is typically newsworthy? Anything that will boost ratings. Which is why, the following scenario of the future where radio talk shows and TV talk shows are concerned, will probably occur if the heads of these giant corporations believe it is what needs to occur to sustain ratings:

The ‘news’ will be All Garbage, All The Time. The national ‘news’ will give us only rumors of sex scandals, footage of debris and corpses and grief-stricken kin, lots of corporate hype, love shots of suicide and murder and-aside from the biennial electoral horse race and the occasional barrage of pro-war propaganda-nothing on the world of politics here or abroad. Local ‘news’, meanwhile, will go on highlighting (black) crime, ‘tragic fire’, grief-stricken kin, etc., thereby keeping everyone as frightened of the city as they are bone-ignorant of what is really going on there.

Both Fallows and Kurtz claim the above scenario and others like it are bad news for journalism. Yet, they also claim it is bad news for politics, voters and the country itself. Kurtz argues that we have become a natio...

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Radio & TV Talkshows. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:10, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1686223.html