CNN and MTV

Back in the early 1980s....I admired M-TV a good bit.  In a normal week, I probably watched six hours of music videos.  My attraction was mostly over the fact that you could take a two to four minute tune....run some great story video in the background, and it was like a sales-job over clothing, cars, lusty women, or Miami.

Over the past decade, I've come to view news networks (MSNBC, Fox, CNN, etc) as having gravitated over to having an effort with a text to attract your attention, and some video-type background that keeps your attention.  All of this....leads to a comparison to M-TV's videos.

Oddly, each of these are built in the same way....three to ten minutes in length.  They've even gone to having actors step in and be occasional fake witnesses to an event....give it that professional image and the right text of words to fill the agenda.

They can sell something....in the same way that M-TV sold clothing, cars, lusty women, or Miami. 

Course, I won't be critical of this....it's their right to be a sort of fake news outlet, and sell 'something'.  The problem here is that as M-TV matured, and audiences moved on....the sales-pitch became tougher each year and a lot of people simply laughed over the images in the end.  It's today to sell clothing, cars, lusty women or Miami. 

So I gaze over at CNN and kinda wonder....at which point will they fail or start to lose viewers?  Well....they already admit their viewer-count is down, and profits are starting to be marginalized. 

I sat this week and watched some of the anti-gun CNN pieces, and realized that it fell into the same path.....clothing, cars, lusty women, Miami, and now anti-gun. Maybe it'll sell for a couple of weeks....at least until the public tires of it, and then it'll just be another theme piece forgotten.