From CNN to Democracy TV

Boston.
One of the cultural icons of the 1980, MTV has come in for some criticism in recent years for its ever-decreasing coverage of the world of music, in favour of sit-coms and reality TV. Actual music videos, the stuff the MTV empire was built on, are featured these days at best as interstitials in between re-runs of The Real World and Punk'd. Having spent almost a month here in Boston and exposed to U.S. television now, I think much the same can safely also be said about CNN: actual news stories are few and far between an endless stream of pundits, 'expert' commentators, and unmitigated political pontification by hosts acting not as news reporters or even merely as news anchors, but as media spectacles (think trainwrecks, not fireworks) in their own right. (Pointedly, the New York Times TV schedule classifies most of CNN's and Fox News' content as 'talk / tabloid' rather than 'news'.) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart did a nice job on pointing out the journalistic travesty of CNN's coverage of Queen Elizabeth's recent visit to the U.S., for example (watch it now, before Comedy Central does its thing and the video disappears from GooTube):

And I thought TV news in the UK was in a sorry state... Now, CNN's resident Anglo buffoon Richard Quest may be a particularly easy target, but overall it's no surprise that the viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (which I guess hasn't made it to Australian shores yet) are as informed about current political events as those who persist with the trash dished out by CNN (across two channels, no less) and its ilk...

Which, however enjoyable Stewart and Colbert may be, nonetheless still left me with the problem of finding another source for my daily news fix. Enter Democracy TV, the vodcast player produced by the Participatory Culture Foundation which plugs into any source of vodcasts available, comes preconfigured with a number of useful channels, and plugs into various video sharing sites. My daily dose of TV news now consists of the nightly Tagesschau news bulletin (the most respected source of news on German television), Newsnight from the BBC (which I've already mentioned as one of the solutions to finding news worth watching in the UK), and Lateline from the ABC (for some Australian flavour, and to keep up with lengthening shadows over the Howard regime). I've refrained from subscribing to the Chaser feed as well for now - I'm not here only to watch television, after all...

Surely a sign of things to come for the international television market, especially as user-made vodcasts grow in quality and quantity; surely also an experience I'll discuss in my submission for the "Beyond Broadcasting" issue of Media International Australia that's coming up. But for now, please excuse me - my TV is ready.

Technorati : ABC, BBC, CNN, Colbert Report, Daily Show, Democracy TV, Tagesschau, news, pundits, television, vodcasting
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