Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 20, 2015

I haven’t watched network news in years.

I watch the BBC, fairly literate coverage.

’Nuff said.Well said.

Reporters on the major networks don’t know what a complete sentence is. I could also comment on the nasal delivery but will leave that for another time.

You mean people still watch news on TV?

If a Kardashian ever caught on fire, it would be on 24/7 for weeks.

On the flip side, most American don’t have the attention span to follow a complete sentence from subject, through predicate, to the complement or the object(s). Mass media created them and now caters to them as they munch, swill, and slurp while filing what passes for minds with important facts (advertisements) between superficial news blurbs.

Time… Life… Luce.

Travis Bickel said, less than a minute agoOne of the things interesting about Trump is his handling of the network talking heads. He ignores them or tells them to flake off and come back when they have something relevant to discuss. In your face network news.

TV news people speak in headlines. It is what they do. I tend to watch CBS in the morning since they tend to have less fluff and more actual news.

I think people are getting Trump fatigue. His act is not cute anymore. Saying it meant something else after his gaffes doesn’t really work after a point. Trump rallies are full of folks who are hateful and he doesn’t correct them. He is disrespectful of any woman who is not a supermodel and/or one that kisses his behind. He also wishes to scapegoat immigrants, an easy target. At the same time, he occasionally has some liberal views sprinkled in, which is surprising, but it doesn’t really overcome his many strange quirks. Trump tends to not answer questions and has gotten away with it for a little while now and his claims of the questions not being relevant is completely untrue. How long will he get away with it? I don’t know but he seems to be losing some his appeal as of late. Part of the rise of Trump seems to be media driven, but at a certain point, with all the coverage, he is bound to self-destruct. Also, the media has to prioritize what they choose to cover. As Bill Maher recently noted, they don’t have to cover every Trump speech as if he is Churchill.

ABC has to be the worse about this style of news reading, but the others aren’t much better. Another thing that bothers me (and I make plenty of grammatical and syntax mistakes myself) is the use of “got” with “have” as in “I’ve got.”

I watch Amy Goodman on Free Speech TV. It’s straight up daily news and superb in-depth stories.

My irritation with network news is that annoying ribbon at the bottom of the screen. It just drones on and on with the same info that they eventually talk about! It was originally used sparingly, for emergencies and such, but now merely competes for your eye’s attention. Useless!

I generally have the news on after work as background noise while I read my newsfeeds online.

IMHO, the ONLY thing that is worth watching on network news is (CBS) channel 2’s “On the road with Steve Hartman,” which airs every Friday about 5 minutes before the end of the 6:30 (PST) newscast.

Build a home out of the material you use in your fire place and act surprised when it reacts naturally to flame..Concrete, dirt, clay, rock, yes,Wood and petrochemicals, no.Or yes and enjoy the fire.

I see Mike got past the participle thing.

It’s really sad that I must now rely on foreign sources like the BBC to get my news.

Darn, Trudeau took the adverbs right out of my mouth.

Seems to me that network “news” is mostly to raise your blood pressure, the better to absorb the persistent advertising. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t heed/buy anything that’s advertised on TV.

This reader, marveling over how close to home this one hits in society …

Good one.

So pleased that finally someone as iconic (=vastly overused news word) as Doonesbury is pointing out this absurd and insulting pop-news technique. Delivering the news clearly once having been a hallmark of good journalism, now tumbling down the abyss into absurd phrasings sounding like just learning to speak English.

No reason evident for this, networks’ strategy likely in punching up important words, not dealing with useless verbs and stuff. Possibly thinking they are saving time, allowing for a greater volume of news to fit into ever-compressing time slot due to networks’ greedy excessivizing the amount of commercial time. Possibly trying to make news sounding as in present tense, but people smartly knowing that’s just bogus.

Failing miserably at communicating unimpeachable and authoritative professionalism, sounding more like badly programmed robot. Smoothing out language with real verbs estimated as really not taking all that much more time, result being appreciated by those respecting a finely crafted sentence, not noticed by those not caring anyway.

Thank you so much, Garry.

Still sitting way too close to the TV.