MARCH 11, 2009

More Views Than News

Television is always more interesting when there’s a feud going on, don’t you think? Not a fictional feud, but real life drama, like the current battle between CNBC and The Daily Show.

If you happened to have missed the rant by Rick Santelli (on-air editor for CNBC and host of “The Rick Revolution/Chicago Tea Party“) on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade last month, you missed quite a show. From my view, the rant appeared to be completely staged, a well-planned gimmick designed to bring some attention to Santelli and CNBC. I’m not the only one to suspect that, although Santelli has denied the accusations. Regardless of the real motive, the clip did indeed become the buzz of the day, eventually reaching The White House and garnering Santelli an invitation to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

But that’s when things got interesting. After accepting the initial invite, Santelli canceled his appearance on the March 4th episode of The Daily Show. Stewart used the cancellation to rip on the entire CNBC Network during his opening monologue. Stewart left no stone unturned, taking shots at everyone from David Faber to Jim Cramer. Not to be outdone, Cramer, the Mad Money maven, responded to Stewart’s attacks several times, including during an appearance on the NBC family of networks yesterday. And that was only the beginning. (For full details, as well as links to all the battle footage, check out this post from Nicholas Graham at The Huffington Post.)

The news, in theory, is supposed to be objective and non-biased, but as this situation clearly indicates, the line between news and entertainment is becoming more and more blurred. As a result, we often get more”views” than news. Why? One word: ratings. People tune in to see drama, but what about plain, old-fashioned, unbiased reporting? Nope. We complain that the news has become biased, yet it appears that if it isn’t - if there isn’t something added to make it interesting like drama and arguments - we won’t watch.

If viewers want the news networks to report unbiased news, then they must be the ones to hold them accountable. We live in a consumer-controlled society - we, the consumers, get what we want.  If we truly want news, then we must turn the “entertainment” off!