More on the clueless

Mike N. commented on my previous post about my experience of watching a few minutes of Hardball:

I agree with you in that I no longer get my news from the TV either. What little bit of truth you do get has to be deciphered from the false and even then it's only about 20% of what you need to know to make a rational evaluation.

I replied that while I do agree that TV news is very biased in presentation and in choosing what to present and what not to, my point is more that this news analysis program offers such patently absurd and illogical "analysis." How can anyone hear these "arguments" and be convinced, unless it's only by hearing phrases they emotionally respond to and howling in agreement, "Yeah! You tell it! Bush sucks!"

I guess I expected a little higher level of discourse here. One that wasn't patently nonsensical if you actually tried to follow their argument. Instead, I hear: "Katrina sucked. Bush didn't make it not suck. Therefore Democrats really can be trusted to govern." Either Scarborough really is a moron, or he isn't even trying to build an argument here, just getting people agreeing with him about President Bush, and then attaching another statement on that they're supposed to agree with because he uttered it right after the first part. My post title, "Are they really _this_ clueless?" could also be taken to be aimed towards the target audience of this approach.

I seriously do not think that news analysis programs were this bad at pretending to present a logical argument 10 or 20 years ago, but maybe I just wasn't as exposed to them when I was 10 or 20 years old.

I am all the more impressed with the ability of Yaron Brook to appear on such a show. I saw him on a show talking about profiling recently, and thought he did a wonderful job in such conditions. It also had someone from CAIR and I could hardly watch it due to the mixture of evasions, whining and threats that is so common from CAIR.