Commentary
TV's Constant Complainers Are Difficult To Live With
- by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, February 28, 2025
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?
Adam, having followed TV programming and audience response for a very long time I have seen many types of content take hold, then get overdone and as, a result , lose many of their viewers. It's all chronicled in my book.
I'm referring to the great anti-violence sentiment of the early 1960s, which resulted from scores of shoot'em up westerns, cop and private eye shows pouring out of the Hollywood studios. These were succeeded by a spate of do -good doctor, lawyer, school teacher shows which were, themeselves over done until they, too, lost favor. Next up were hosts of sitcoms--many adventure/fantasy based--"Bewitched", "Gilligan's Island", "Addams Family", " I Dream Of Jeannie", "The Munsters", etc and then rustic sitcoms--"The Beverly Hillbillies", Green Acres", "Petticoat Junction", etc. until viewers got tired of them. I could go on and on as this story has always repeated itself ---until the past ten years or so.
What's different?
It's the political climate.
People keep watching the shows you mentioned and many others like them---mostly on cable---because they have come to agree with the political point of the views espoused by the hosts and how they treat "the enemy". It has become very much like TV's version of social media--and in this harsh climate of kill the "enemy" it's not coing to change---I'm sorry to say.