Dan Abrams has a message for you: “If you’re a news purist, and you are looking for strictly international news and news that is simply important and not interesting, then you are going to be disappointed” by cable news.
The new general manager of MSNBC made the comments more than a year ago on a radio show. The host, Graham Bensinger, mentioned cable’s tendency to cover salacious stories, and asked Abrams if he thought that it was a legitimate concern. Here’s what Abrams said at the time:
| “It’s a legitimate concern if you’re viewing cable news as purely information. I would say, you know, if people want to get their news, there are plenty of places they can get it. I heard you say you’re going to be interviewing Brian Williams later in the show. There’s no better network newscast than Brian Williams’ newscast. And if you want to know, in a half an hour, what’s going on in the world and this country, you should watch the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. You shouldn’t be watching– you’re not going to get from my show, or from many of these cable shows, necessarily the most important news stories of the day. You are going to get the most interesting and the most compelling and sometimes the most important. But I just think that to say cable news is a disappointment if it’s not doing the same thing as newspapers or the evening newscasts, I just don’t agree with that. I think cable news is something a little bit different, and you know, I think there’s still plenty of venues for people to get the most important news of the day.” |
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