The Cable News Patrol: Glenn and Rachel Become My New Best Friends

As a small boy half a century ago, I vividly recall accompanying my widowed grandmother to the live TV broadcast of "The Price Is Right." During the warm-up before the show, I cringed with embarrassment as my grandmother (a formidable woman who favored sensible shoes and hairpins) asked the host, Bill Cullen, the kind of personal question normally reserved for close friends and family. Only later did I realize that my grandmother, living alone, had been listening to Cullen for years on the radio -- and thought he was family.

After watching cable TV news virtually nonstop as an experiment since Monday morning, I am finding it equally difficult to remember who lives on which side of my 42-inch TV screen. As a result of these blurring boundaries, I care that Glenn Beck is valiantly doing his show despite a crippling cold and raspy voice; I am honored that Joe Scarborough lives somewhere in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; I am troubled that CNN daytime anchor Heidi Collins suffers from migraine headaches; and I have noted in my BlackBerry to send a card to CNN weatherman Chad Myers on Groundhog's Day, which is also his wedding anniversary.

A commercial Friday morning on "Fox and Friends" for LifeLock ("the gold standard in identity-theft protection") symbolized my plight. Until a temporary siege of house arrest (my leg is in a bright red cast) prompted my maniacal exploration of the major cable news networks, I was a well-informed political columnist who devoured four newspapers a day and visited a dozen serious news Web sites. While I never watched cable news, I knew that Glenn Beck is a godfather of the tea party movement and that Rachel Maddow has become a liberal icon even more beloved than Bill Moyers. Now thanks to my low-calorie cable-saturation diet (60 hours a week with no other news sources), I have become a plaything of the body snatchers. Although I feel like I know Glenn and Rachel personally, beyond the headlines (Haiti, the hapless Harry Reid, and the over-hyped Sarah Palin) I am dangerously shaky about the other news of the week. To put it another way, I am now the hedgehog in that famous fragment of ancient Greek poetry: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Most of the critiques of cable TV news follow the predictable fault lines of ideology: Fox is faulted for being too in-your-face conservative or MSNBC is mauled for being too inside-the-Beltway liberal. Caught in the crossfire is CNN, the venerable network that seemingly cannot decide -- it varies from hour to hour -- whether it wants to remain a globe-girdling news organization or to emulate the gimmicky crowd-pleasing practices of local TV news.

Yes, the poison-gas partisanship on Fox and MSNBC -- particularly in prime time -- can leave the unwary viewer struggling to find an oxygen mask. Sean Hannity and Keith Olbermann may deserve each other, but what have we possibly done in prior lives to deserve either of them? But the real deficiency of cable TV news (compared to newspapers and the Internet) is the anorexic shortage of facts and insights per commercial break. Even though I am chair-bound, I found myself constantly thinking during my cable marathon, "I'd walk a mile for a news nugget."

Take my dispiriting experience flipping channels Friday morning from 7:00-9:00, the time of the day when cable takes on the world-roundup role that used to be the primary responsibility of newspapers. Watching cable news until late Thursday night, I anticipated a news-rich morning with updates on Haitian earthquake relief; final White House health care negotiations: the Massachusetts Senate race; testimony in the blue ribbon inquiry into the causes of the financial meltdown, and the president's efforts to impose an excise tax on bailed-out banks. Judging from the cornucopia of newspaper headlines flashed on the screen at MSNBC, all these stories -- and more -- were available from dead-tree journalism.

"Morning Joe" on MSNBC (which many regard as the gold or, at least, the gold-plated standard for cable news shows) led the news at 7:00 with obligatory and harrowing five minute update from Haiti. Then Joe Scarborough and Company switched to the kind of reality with which they are far more familiar -- two new polls showing seismic movement away from the Democrats both in Massachusetts and nationally. For the next 25 minutes, a tag team of top political journalists (David Gregory and Chuck Todd from NBC, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and National Journal columnist Ron Brownstein) dissected the numbers, doing everything but performing on-air regression analysis. The reporters are smart and their analysis was shrewd, but the exercise was also the equivalent of watching the conventional wisdom harden before your very eyes. Think how often you have heard on TV close variants of Meacham's observation about Obama: "He's going to have a very hard time with the clarity of a populist message, to say the least."

Health care reform was discussed during this segment, but only in the narrow political context of the Massachusetts campaign and the dire legislative implications for the Democrats if they lose their filibuster-proof Senate majority. But never was the substance of the health care negotiations dissected in detail, even though late Thursday the White House reached a compromise with labor over the taxation of blue-chip "Cadillac" health care plans. "Morning Joe" -- an over-caffeinated show where every day is election day -- was much more comfortable interviewing near miss 2006 Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford about his probable Democratic primary challenge to appointed New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. There was an incestuous quality to the interview since Ford, a regular on "Morning Joe," is still an official "MSNBC analyst." It is not just Fox News -- which has ballyhooed Palin like Charles Lindbergh arriving in Paris -- that has conflict-of-interest problems from blurring the line between politician and pundit.

CNN's "American Morning," hosted by John Roberts, made the journalistically defensible decision to devote virtually the entire program to Haitian mourning. Some of the sad-eyed reporting -- especially by Anderson Cooper -- was exemplary. But as the humanitarian disaster in Haiti entered its third day, CNN producers seemed worried about how to hold an audience when one injured or homeless earthquake victim looks like another. A scary don't-touch-that-dial graphic flashed on the screen Friday morning read: "Coming Up -- Inmates Running Wild."

CNN is also devoting an increasing number of segments to smile button stories about typical Americans who discovered that family members visiting Haiti had survived the ordeal completely unharmed. Shortly after 8:00 Friday morning, CNN showed taped footage from Haiti of its medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, who is also a neurosurgeon, examining a 15-day-old baby for a concussion and then bandaging her head wound. Not even the most punctilious journalistic purist should object to Gupta taking on a caregiver's role in the midst of this wrenching crisis. But it was cynically self-serving and exploitative for CNN to broadcast this segment so often that I saw it four times in the space of 12 hours -- and I was also switching channels and sleeping during that period.

As these 60 hour Eye Glaze cable TV chronicles head into the home stretch (a final installment will be posted Monday morning), I find myself amused by the circadian rhythms that govern life in Cableland. As I started my ordeal last Monday morning, I watched John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, the authors of "Game Change," plug their 2008 campaign retrospective on "Morning Joe." In a reassuring update of the circle game, Heilemann and Halperin (according to an MSNBC on-air graphic) will be featured guests on "Morning Joe" next Monday morning.

Day 1: A New Survivor Show: Watching a Week of Cable News and Living to Tell

Day 2: The Cable News Patrol: Rounding Up the Usual Suspects and Subjects

Day 3: The Cable News Patrol: Sound Bite Skirmishing Silenced (Mostly) by Real Life Tragedy

Day 4: The Cable News Patrol: Glenn and Rachel Become My New Best Friends

Day 5: The Cable News Patrol: My Long National Nightmare Is Over!