TV PROGRAMMING IN A PRESIDENTIAL YEAR

Saturday and Sunday mornings used to be special for me. I would get up early, shower, and make coffee so I would be ready to watch UP on MSNBC. This ritual started in a long time ago when Chris Hayes was the host of that show. Hayes is a bleeding-heart liberal, like me, so I did not expect the new show to be worth watching. What made the difference with this show was a balanced panel of experts, usually educators such as professors of politics, international policy, etc. The discussions were the most erudite on TV. I have to admit that this is a low bar because TV media has low standards. Nevertheless, UP was a good show, but now it is gone. Recently, MSNBC has replaced that show with more of the usual nonsense. While mauling this over while looking for something decent to watch this morning, I stumbled on to State of the Union hosted by Jake Tapper on CNN. In my judgment, this show is a new low in TV journalism. It was so bad it made Fox look liberal. Thinking about what is taking place in news programming on TV, I see something happening that is scaring me. We will soon be in a presidential election year. The Republican Party run by a few rich men, using the corrupted Supreme Court, has changed the voting pattern, state by state, in the Untied States. They have used voter ID laws, minority voter suppression, district gerrymandering, domination of state election commissions, and above all they are diverting attention of the voter from economic policy to social and religious issues by promoting one issue voters; same-sex marriage, abortion, right to practice religions, guns, immigration, etc. This practice has allowed them to take over Congress. I know it works because I live in North Carolina. My state now has two of the most radical Senators in the United States Congress; Thom Tillis and Richer Burr. Now the Republicans are focusing on taking over the White House. The way they can do this is to convince the majority of people who vote, to vote the same way the people in the states are voting, which is according to everything but economic issues. What I see is a move to take over all news programs with Republican hosts, Republican commentators, and Republican chairpersons of expert panels controlled by Republicans. My unhappiness with the Jake Tapper show was because it was back-to-back people with radical right wing views, and they invited Elizabeth Warren, but Jake tried to belittle her remarks. However, like happened at the Planned Parenthood hearing, Committee Chairman Chaffetz was belittled by the chairwoman of that organization, Senator Warren turned the tables on the host. Tapper was visibly embarrassed. Nevertheless, network after network is flooding the airways with a radical right-wing program after program. I can turn off the TV or look for something else to watch but cannot find any political program of value. Need I mention that Jake Tapper is on CNN. How can this be true in a free market? Why don’t the networks look at ratings? We expect the answer in this age of Citizen United is money; Republicans own and control the networks and where that fails, they buy control of the programming by buying all the advertisements. URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated