Being on TV night after night criticizing,
complaining and attacking seems like an exhausting thing to do.
But there they are on the cable news channels, the talk-show hosts who air the same grievances day
after day and year after year like they’re trapped on a commentary hamster wheel.
Why do they do it? Or even more importantly, how do they keep doing
it? These questions are rhetorical.
“If you think it’s so easy, then you try it,” wrote a TV critic long ago, addressing persons unseen.
“It is not easy being critical, to engage sourly in a never-ending exercise in fault-finding.”
“Over time,” he wrote, “I found
myself adopting an instinctually critical view of just about everything, TV shows or otherwise. It is a mindset that can be difficult to live with.”
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The critic was referring to living with himself. But he was also referring to others who might find it difficult to live with someone like him who is engaged in a “never-ending
exercise in fault-finding.”
Today, it seems as if everybody does it. Everybody is sour, critical, pessimistic and spoiling for a heated argument.
Everybody thinks they know everything too because they watch the talk shows and read their newsfeeds. They soak
it all up and feel informed.
The opinionators above -- Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News and Jake Tapper of CNN -- were chosen in order to illustrate this blog
with a representative of each of the cable news channels.
The three vary in their approaches to what they do, but the point is lost on no one that the three TV
channels they represent are the highest-profile hotbeds of partisan editorializing that we have.
It is mentally exhausting today to be a regular person on
the receiving end of all the noise emanating from all the political media today.
So many of the top
personalities on the news channels hang in there for years. Sean Hannity is a good example. His Fox News show has been on for 16 years.
The way he does it is: Fight, fight, fight every night. Rachel Maddow seemed to be the same way when her show “Rachel Maddow” was seen every
weeknight.
Although she reduced her workload to one night a week -- Mondays -- in 2022, the show has been around in some form or another since September
2008.
She stepped away from a five-day-a-week schedule because she wanted to devote time to some other projects.
While that is likely true, she also may have felt burned out from setting fires every night and then sitting too close to them. With what she does for a living, who can blame
her?