The Previous Post Brings Us to This Point

Also postured by DC Media Girl but something I've said before: CNN (and others) should NOT be using Faux News as the role model for anything except how not to be a news network. From DC Media Girl:

Over the past few months, we’ve all read an interminable number of articles which outline CNN chief Jon Klein’s grand plan for CNN. He blathers on quite a bit about "storytelling" and other such nonsense, but you and I both know that when push comes to shove, he’s really only talking about one thing: Beating Fox.

...CNN is competing against the wrong folks. Why? Because they’ve been suckered into playing along with the fiction that Fox is a "news" channel, which it isn’t. Fox is a delivery mechanism for a news-like product consisting of propaganda and infotainment, but one thing it DOESN’T broadcast is news. For more on this I refer you to OUTFOXED. And yes, I realize that the word "News" is Fox’s middle name, so to speak, but so what? I’m reminded of Stan, the character Eric Idle played in THE LIFE OF BRIAN, who asked his fellow revolutionaries to start calling him Loretta. Just because they obliged didn’t make him a woman, you know.

Since FNC is really in the entertainment business, perhaps it would be useful to compare the ratings of one of its primetime shows to another in the same time slot. Compare, if you will, THE O’REILLY FACTOR, the program Fox boasts the loudest about, to TNT’s LAW AND ORDER, with which it competes. On any given night, a ten-year old episode of L&O consistently beats "The Factor" by at least a million viewers, if not more. It’s fun to compare apples to apples for a change.

So here’s my message to Jon Klein: Cut it out.

Exactly!

And I'd love to see how DC Media Girl handled herself on a venue like CNN or MSNBC. But we won't get that chance. Not the way cable news (or network news, for that matter) is going, which is an express trip down into the public sewers.