Umair Haque reviews the state of TV news in America:
Now that I’m in the States, when I make the mistake of trying to watch some news, I get, instead, a dose of catastrophically stupid anchorbots yelling at each other (or better yet, at me). You know the score – O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, Paula Zahn, etc…
This is a mini case study in why Media 1.0 is dying such an agonizing, painful, awful death. I mean, here in SF I get about 10 news channels – and I still can’t get any news. All I can get is screaming, shouting, honeymoon murders, infotainment, blah, blah. Not to mention about 30 mins/hr of ads.
Forget strategy for a second. We don’t need any economics to tell us why media’s dying anymore: (how can I put this nicely) it sucks. Beyond sucks. It absolutely blows. There are no words to express the suckage anymore.
Well, that’s perhaps too much of a blanket condemnation. But I have had the experience of having cable news on just to have something on and then looking back after two hours to realize I didn’t learn a damned thing new.
