A Rant on CNN and the Internet

The Internet's a pretty sweet deal. It has created a two-way medium, where people can get the information that they want and respond to it. It's giving traditional one-way media, such as television and newspapers, a run for their money and an urgent need to evolve if they're going to survive.

For years, people have been talking about how the future of television lies in the Internet, but they haven't quite figured out how to integrate the two in order to cash in, other than sending people to their websites for further information, contests or polls, which results in more advertising revenue. But lately, you can see many stations testing out new ideas in an attempt to integrate the net into television viewing.

When I first came across Jack Cafferty's segment on CNN's The Situation Room, I would change the channel, because his segment of reading viewers' e-mails seemed like a thinly-vailed attempt to draw me to their website. I wanted to spend my lunch hour getting caught up on worldly events (or at least some juicy political banter), and didn't have time to waste on listening to what some jerk in Alabama thinks about the question of the day.

I don't know if Jack changed his style or if I decided to give him another chance, but his segment eventually became my favorite part of the show, not for its viewer emails, but for his "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to stand for it" rants, which I often found myself agreeing with. If you're unfamiliar with his work, check out his thoughts on Sarah Palin:

Suddenly, I didn't mind spending some of my time hearing from viewers. He'd basically give his point of view, then allow the viewers to give theirs, and unlike some similar segments on other shows, he'd read their responses without disputing their ideas. It's become an interesting, although fairly basic, way of integrating the Internet with television.

Lately, CNN has been stepping it up a notch, giving the final hour of their CNN Newsroom show to this dude named Rick Sanchez. At first, I didn't particularly care for Rick. Much like Wolf Blitzer, he'd spend much of the show patting the CNN staff on the back and kissing the asses of the viewers.

The entire basis for his show was his interaction with the "Twitter Board", where he was constantly recieving text messages from viewers through Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. While it seemed like a clever way to make television news seem more like a conversation than a lecture, I lost interest pretty quickly, much like I did with Cafferty. For every ten minutes of news, three would be spent telling me what SexyAngel23 thinks about Sarah Palin's wardrobe. More often than not, I'd find myself flipping channels to Fox News' Live Desk, which in all fairness is just as divisive and gimickey, so the hour would be spent flipping between the two.

Yesterday, Rick surprised me. I caught part of his interview with one of the McCain PR folks, and I was captivated with what I was seeing...

As we come to the end of a nearly 2-year presidential election, we've all become sick and tired of watching political lackeys (on all sides of the aisle) make ridiculous claims or exaggerations that blatantly blur the facts, and news anchors and reporters usually let them get away with it, or leaving it up to another fact-blurring lackey to dispute their claims. Here, we see an occurrence that should be a regular thing in the media: lying public figures being called on their lies. Isn't that the job of the media? TV news isn't supposed to be a soapbox that anyone can blather their nonsense from, but a source of information that has been filtered through professional journalists. It shouldn't seem so shocking when a journalist asks an obvious question that people at home are shouting at their TVs, but it is. I was shocked that Sanchez pulled a "gotcha" on this kid by simply asking him to explain his point. And it was awesome.

Maybe that's the effect of Cafferty and Sanchez's interactions with viewers through the Internet... they feel that they are being held accountable by those who are watching rather than worrying about offending the person that they're interviewing or burning bridges with the campaigns. Is the Internet the savior of the news media? That's yet to be seen, but one thing's for sure... It's great for stuff like this.