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Monday, August 17, 2009

Potty Talk Creeps into Cable News

The talk on the cable talk shows has been getting a little raunchy in recent weeks. And I’m not talking about the occasional guest’s slip of the tongue. Increasingly it appears as though vague sexual references are being written into some programs as shtick.

The prime offenders have to be folks at MSNBC. Looking to discredit the so-called Tea Party protesters, Rachel Maddow, egged on perhaps by liberal bloggers, consistently refers to them as “Teabaggers.” According to UrbanDictionary.com, a teabagger might mean … oh well, just click here if you don’t already know.

Maddow isn’t making a gaffe here. “The teabaggers, where they did turn out, appeared to be having a ball,” she stated during a “news” segment.

Maddow is not alone, either. Putatively serious newsman Anderson Cooper infamously mumbled on live television, “it’s hard to talk when your teabagger,” though he probably meant that it’s hard to talk when you are getting teabagged, which the tea party folks were not. But it doesn’t matter. At the bottom of the cable news food chain there seems to be an unspoken contest between hosts to make as many childish references to sex and genital as time allows.

Cooper’s co-CNNer Campbell Brown recently referred to her 8:00 time slot rivals Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann as “Big Swinging Anchor Number One” and “Big Swinging Anchor Number Two.” Brown is losing badly to both O’Reilly and Olbermann in the ratings.

Few people are as enthusiastic a spectator of the cable news wars as I am. But those who argue “Infotainment” is a race to the bottom may have a point.

Finally, let’s not allow Fox News Channel to get off scot-free. It doesn’t get any closer to the edge than this:

Topics: anderson-cooper, campbell-brown, keith-olbermann, rachel-maddow

Posted by Patrick Hynes on 08/17 at 05:11 AM

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Comments

It’s but a small part, just a bellwether, of the de-evolution of civilization, a process well underway world-wide.

I fear Yeats had it right. He was off by a few years, but still…....

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Posted by RedBeard on 08/17 at 05:52 AM

I think this is why they have shows like Red Eye in the time slots that they do.

Posted by skinny @ blrag.com on 08/21 at 09:07 AM

I was thinking of looking up some of them newspaper websites, but am glad I came here instead. Although glad is not quite the right word… let me just say I needed this after the incessant chatter in the media, and am grateful to you for articulating something many of us are feeling - even from distant shores.
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Posted by Amill on 10/12 at 10:48 AM

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