Rant #2,616: Talk Talk

Well it is Friday, and like they say, “Thank God It’s Friday.”
 
I have to tell you, I never understood that proclamation.
 
Friday is still part of the work week, so yes, once you get to Friday, you just have to get through the day to finish that week …
 
So shouldn’t it be “Thank God It’s Saturday?”
 
I guess it simply doesn’t have that “ring” to it.
 
But whatever the case, it is Friday, and for those lucky enough to be employed—yes, unemployment is rising again due to the coronavirus—you have to get through one more day to end the workweek—
 
Unless you have to work on the weekend, like my wife does this Saturday.
 
Since she is also working today, that means for her, and probably millions of others, it is “Thank God It’s Sunday.”
 
And I am sure that the CBS Evening News is looking forward to its final broadcast during the workweek, because its Thursday news half hour was probably the worst 30 minutes of journalism that I have ever witnessed in my 63 years of life on this planet.
 
Look, Norah O’Donnell was brought into this broadcast because of her impeccable journalistic career on CBS, where she worked the morning show and often sparred, both on camera and off of it, with cohort Gayle King.
 
O’Donnell would lend a female voice to the veritable broadcast—one that Walter Cronkite made a national must-see show in the 1960s and 1970s but has fallen on really hard times since—and the show wanted O’Donnell so bad that it moved its base from New York City to Washington, D.C., so she could be closer to her husband and family.
 
She had a large task in front of her, because the show is regularly the doormat of the three major network evening newscasts, and her presence was actually a good idea, after the likes of Dan Rather, Scott Pelley, and Katie Couric brought the show to the depths that it had reached.
 
But months into her tenure as the anchor of her show, O’Donnell has proven that she is not up to the task of overseeing this show, and last night might have been the nadir of her time at the helm.
 
The show covered all the usual news stories of the day, including that horrible mass shooting at the massage parlors in Georgia, where Asian women were shot at and several died from the attack.
 
Yes, that is an absolutely horrible incident, but journalism being what it is today, you certainly got a completely slanted coverage of that chaos from the CBS Evening News last night.
 
First of all, Georgia police are looking at all angles of the crime, but they themselves have said that this horrendous act might not have been a hate crime against Asians, because the alleged perpetrator said he had a sex addiction and needed to "remove" these supposed massage parlors from his reach to conquer his demons.
 
Look, the guy is crazy, so he has no idea of right and wrong, but if he is, indeed, a sex addict—backed up by a former roommate of this person who was interviewed on the yellow-journalism “Inside Edition” show right afterward--then what exactly was going on in the two massage parlors that the alleged perpetrator attacked? It obviously wasn’t massages and that was it.
 
But the broadcast never looked into that angle.
 
Look, I understand, several people are needlessly dead, and that is the main focus, but was this an attack on sex workers? That would have been an interesting angle to explore, but again, I can give the show a pass on that, because the women are dead, done in by a lunatic, so that should be the focus.
 
But then we get to the meat of my Rant__
 
After reporting on the incident, another story looked at attacks on the Asian community since the coronavirus hit our shores.
 
A legitimate angle, for sure, given the incidents happening around us, but the coverage by the show was despicable, continuing its slant that white people are to blame for all the ills that have befallen the country during the past months or years or decades or generations.
 
An elderly Asian woman was attacked in San Francisco, and the reporter doing the story put an extra emphasis on the fact that the attacker in this incident was white, and I mean, as the reporter said it, WHITE, as if to emphasize that whites are the protagonists in all of these incidents.
 
That was followed up by a montage of similar incidents caught on camera from around the country, where Asians were hit, slapped, punched and verbally assaulted by others.
 
In each part of the video montage, the protagonist was black or a person of color, and this was not even mentioned by the reporter. No, there was no mention of black or person of color as the antagonists, no BLACK  or PERSON OF COLOR in comparison to the WHITE that was emphasized earlier in the story.

We see the same unfortunate story on the local news each and every day, and in the New York area, the alleged protagonists are not white, they are black or people of color. 

No matter who does these things, it is horrible, but wait, there is more to talk about ...
 
And then another incident on film was shown, edited to show a white woman yelling at an Asian from the back of a cab, using slurs against whoever she was yelling at. The woman just happened to be the daughter of Senator Patrick Moynihan, the late,  liberal conscious of New York City politics for decades.
 
Sure, the woman appeared to be crazy, yelling and screaming at an unseen person, but you were never told what provoked this incident, so again, whites were portrayed as the devil in these altercations, even though at least in the video montage that preceded the clip, blacks and people of color were the only protagonists shown.
 
This simply follows the show’s anti-white slant that has been going on for months, where white people are shown as being the cause of all of our ills white others stand up for “social justice” while O’Donnell smiles with glee with her “Howdy Doody” face and toothy grin amplifying the fact that this is shoddy journalism at its best.
 
Later in the show, there was a story of a dog and cat collar that was causing animals to get sick and even die from whatever is in the collars.
 
Horrible story, but it was made even more horrid by the way the story was promoted on the local news show that preceded it.
 
On the local CBS news show here in New York, they have a nightly cut-in with O’Donnell to get people interested in not turning to another channel to watch the national news afterward.
 
The promo brought up the collars, but not only did the promo state that it might be sickening or killing our pets, it also might be harming humans too.
 
I know what I heard. I even made a joie to my wife, “Are they going to say that the collar is hurting people of color more than white people?” alluding to the fact that the news has often focused on the difference in toxicity of the coronavirus to different populations that the news has harped on for months while spouting the motto “We are all in this together” within the same breath.
 
Well, the show got to the story about the collars, and while it delved pretty deeply into the pet danger angle, it never once brought up anything about human health and the collars.
 
This is shoddy journalism at its finest, akin to the famous National Enquirer story of years back stating on the cover headline “Cher Has Incurable Disease” and then the story stating that her “incurable disease” was acne.

The promo alluded to the toxicity of the collard to humans as well as their pets, but was it actually talking about the mental toll on humans related to their pets' well-being and that was it? You would never get that from the promo.
 
You stoke the fire, you better have the logs to use in the fire to sustain it.
 
And all the while, O’Donnell smiles her toothy grin and acts like what her show is portraying is REAL journalism.
 
There have been other errors in recent weeks. 

I covered one story that they covered—how military families are suffering from “food insecurity” during the pandemic, and that shoddy report never spoke with the military resale services that I cover in my remote job for any input on the many programs they have for military families that are suffering—they just focused on outside food banks, talking head military people that they made look like unknowing buffoons, and families driving expensive, late model cars to go to the pantries.
 
Very shoddy journalism indeed. There are many programs for these people can use which are available through their local military stores, but CBS had an agenda, and they went with it.
 
And that is the problem with the show. O’Donnell goes around like a happy leprechaun feeding us this agenda as real, straightforward news, and it simply isn’t.
 
It is full of agendas, full of opinions, and full of anti-white rhetoric, and even casual viewers can question these type of ethics being employed on a news program that is supposed to report the news straight down the middle, and not make their own judgments on the news.
 
When you watch, you are not looking for CNN or OAN, MSNBC or Fox News, you are looking for something straight down the middle—and you aren’t getting it.
 
Shame on CBS, shame on O’Donnell, and shame on us for watching this trash.
 
I would get more real news from watching “Leave It To Beaver” than this garbage.
 
Just one man’s opinion, but I am sure that I am not alone in my summations.
 
“Thank God It’s Friday” so I don’t have to pollute my mind any more this week … until Monday.
 
Have a good weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday—in the morning, before the news smog sets in.