As IF Times

link AOL and Huffington Post sued by unpaid bloggers | Reuters.

You knew this was coming, it was just a matter of time.  A few months back, America Online decided that the best way to spend their cash horde was to buy the far left wing graffiti, er I mean blog site, The Huffington Post for $315 million dollars.

Kudos to Arianna Huffington for being shrewd enough to create and promote her website as the repository for deranged ideologues.  The Post became the place to be seen for written opinions of the lefty persuasion and included scribblings from noted entertainment personalities which served to even more embellish the Post’s reputation.   For many bloggers who contributed to the opinions, having Huffington Post credentials conferred, to them at least, legitimacy, as if it were some kind of literary achievement.   In reality, most of the content could be found spray painted on the side of buildings as nonsensical diatribe.  The Post however gave voice and a stage to the raving ideologues.

Now that Arianna has gone mainstream, those same bloggers are clamoring for their share of the loot from AOL.  Good luck.  If their logic held any water, Hugh Hefner would have to share his profits with all the girls who had ever graced the pages of Playboy, since it can be argued it was their contributions that really drove the magazine.  These prototypical geeks writing pieces in their mother’s basement in their underwear may feel betrayed by Arianna, since they were supposed to be united against ‘the man’, ie the ‘establishment’.  Now it turns out, she is one of them.  So much for ideology and comrades in arms.

Bloggers write and pontificate on all sorts of things.  In general, nobody really cares unless you happen to have some previous notoriety from real life.  Then, you can spit out all kinds of flotsam and people will drink in your every word.  Think Charlie Sheen.  In America, it’s what sells, not what’s neccessarily good.  So the bottom line is, these shut out bloggers had better start writing something legitimate because their graffiti wall is gone.  Maybe it’s back to the spray can for most of them.

link Sideshow: Wholl take Courics CBS anchor chair? | Philadelphia Inquirer | 04/05/2011.

What, are there no hand puppets available?  In this day of computer generated graphics, isn’t it possible to synthesize a cartoon character to read the news?  Although the job probably pays a pittance of only 10 million dollars a year, can’t they find some aspiring model or journalism student to fill the space?  Wouldn’t it be just as effective to have the weather girl on channel 7 read the news?  To be clear, the person is not expected to make the news, only read it aloud on the teleprompter.  Any dummy can do that as we know. Someone has to enlighten us rubes outside of New York city as to why replacing Couric should be that difficult.

In days gone by, a personality like Walter Cronkite was determined to have credibility when he read the news.  He was a familiar face and and even more familiar voice that brought the news of the world to Americans during the all important dinner hour.  Back then, with only 3 major television networks broadcasting, the delivery of what was news was filtered by ABC, NBC and of course CBS.  The veracity of their versions of events were beyond question.   Of course, in those days, The New York Times was a legitimate newspaper.

This grip on information by the major networks has long become a relic of a quainter time.  As the access to information has opened up to all who are willing to look, the importance and even relevance of the major news networks’ version of events have diminished greatly.  Gradually, people could see and think for themselves (well mostly) what was truly happening in the world and opinions often formed which differed from the offerings of the networks.  If CBS had lost Walter Cronkite during the late ’60’s, it would have been a devastating blow since America hung on to uncle Walt’s every word as gospel.  It can be argued that much of how America viewed major issues of the day was shaped by the utterances of uncle Walter.  To his credit, Cronkite seldom betrayed any personal judgement in delivering the news.  It was apparent that he told it, ‘just the way it was’ as his trademark signoff claimed.

When Couric took over the anchor chair, to great fanfare at the time, her background was that of daytime talk show host on another network.   In that role, she often was in the news herself as a personality and celebrity of the New York media scene.  Couric had to transform herself from perky interviewer to somber newscaster.  She never did seem to be able to bring the gravitas and objectivity of news to the public as did her predecessors.  This of course excludes his nutness, Dan Rather, who began the whole demise of the credibility franchise at CBS. But that’s another story.   During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, she was widely lauded by the left for her apparently revealing question to Sarah Palin about what she read.  The implication was of course, not what she read, but if she read.   While the mainstream media credited Couric with brilliant reportage, it begs the question of whether that same question would be asked of any male candidate.

From that point on, her fate was sealed.  Most of America saw this somewhat condescending event as confirmation of her lightweight talk show background.  Any pretensions to being a genuine news broadcaster was shattered.  Viewers left in droves from the CBS evening news broadcast.  To be fair, the other national broadcasters also suffered the same collapse in viewership, but not as dramatically as at CBS.   Couric had to go.

Getting back to the original point then, how hard could it be to find someone to read the news?  Once the insular types at the networks peer out of their towers in manhattan, they may figure out that the U.S. extends beyond mid town New York.  But it may be all moot because the franchise on being the gatekeeper for the public’s news consumption is long gone.  It’s now true that some of the most significant stories broken today are not by the big news networks, but by cable or internet based operations.   It’s also true that broadcasters do not offer the balanced analysis offered by other information concerns.  To add insult, The National Enquirer, known to many as a gossip rag, has broken some of the biggest news stories of the day.   It’s as if Charlie Sheen became Walter Cronkite.  Come to think of it, Charlie may be looking for a job….