Why Not A War News Show?
I had this idea today.
Why not a War News television show?
I’m sure I’m notthe first person who has thought of this. I simply can’t be. It seems like such an obvious thing that a thousand bloggers must have brought it up before, yet, for the life of me, I can’t remember anyone who has.
So I’m going to do it here and now.
Tons of us in the blogosphere wonder quite often why we don’t hear all the good news coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in this war that we’re fighting. We hear, in little bits here and there about fighting in Fallujah and Ramadi and Sadr City, but we don’t hear any in-depth reporting on the actions there. We don’t see the images we ought to be seeing of our soldiers, except in hokey standups by people like Geraldo Rivera that do more to promote the reporters than it does the troops and the war effort. We don’t see what’s happening Stateside with people supporting the war by mounting care package drives and letter-writing campaigns.
We don’t see any of that because the war pretty much gets five minutes or so at the top of the 6 o’clock news, and five minutes at the top of the hour on the cable news networks. You hear the same story all day long because that’s all the time there seems to be.
So why don’t we push one of the cable networks for a weekly show? It could be an hour long, or even more if they keep finding good stories and it could take the place of one of those ratings-sucking shows they run on Saturday or Sunday evenings. Fox could replace it’s weekened recap program. MSNBC could replace pretty much any show it has. So could CNN.
How about it, cable TV moguls? Roger Ailes, are you reading this?
Get one of the hotshot anchors to host it, put a stable of reliable and dogged reporters on the team. Embed them with the troops. Let them hunt out the war stories here in the US. Let us see the troops shipping out.
Show us the medal ceremonies.
Be there when the new schools open and the power stations come online.
Do the troops not have good equipment? Show us what they’re using.
Do Iraqis hate us or love us? Show us instead of letting us get it in the occasional poll.
Buy advertising time before movies in theaters, just like the old World War II newsreels. They’d sure as hell beat the interminable commercials and it would draw viewers.
Would some people call it propaganda? Yep, they would. So what? They’d watch, just like the people would who would think it was a tremendous and incredibly patriotic thing to do. Would you catch heat? Oh yeah you would. Again, so what? Your critics would still watch. They’d be eyeballs on the screen just like all the others.
And your advertisers would eat it up like grape jelly on toast.
So what do you say, cable guys? Fox? CNN? MS-NBC? Can we get a weekly War News show?
If not, why the heck not?
UPDATE: Villainous Cassandra, via the comment section, makes an excellent point. Perhaps what’s requried here is a good, old-fashioned blogswarm, focused on potential sponsors. Get the sponsors, and the broadcasters will come.
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Category: Fighting the Islamists
Jimmie, I think that's a tremendous idea.
Seriously, you want to know why no one's doing it, though?
I'll bet it's because no corporation wants to sponsor it.
But I'll bet, if you (we) could FIND a few corps willing to sign on as ad sponsors (WALMART, Perot Systems, anyone?) they would be that much more likely to do it. THAT's what normally drives these decisions – advertising revenue.
I can't imagine that there isn't a corporation that wants to sponsor it. My guess is that no corporation has ever been asked.
This seems like an awful good thing for the blogosphere to come together on, don't you? We've blogswarmed for other things. I'm sure we can swarm for this.
[...] Villainous Cassandra, via the comment section, makes an excellent point. Perhaps what’s requried here is a good, old-fashioned blogswarm, focused on potentialsponsors. Get the sponsors, and the broadcasters will come. Filed under: [...]
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Jimmy, you still breathin'?
This is an outstanding idea. And the blogswarm thing might get it going. Too good an idea to drop. Weekly show, prime time. Maybe Hannity and Colmes could do it each week, one night a week.
P.S. I tried to do a trackback ping to you, but for some reason couldn't get your Trackback URL to come up when I clicked. So just know I've posted your idea/site on my today's posts under "Great Idea." Count me in. Ah, wait a minute, I maybe have figured out what I was doing wrong, the ping may yet come. Thanks.
nope… ping wouldn't work.
I'm sure it's a great idea but if the media thought there would be an audiance they would have thought of it first. My guess is that people would rather look at missing teenagers for the rest of their lives.
[...] Powerline also has a good essay about how we got through previous wars. Perhaps Jimmie Bise’s prosposed War News Show is what I need!UPDATE II: Wow, when I wrote this I had no idea I was going to get flamed from all [...]