Who's Sour On the NewsHour?

 I am.

The once-staid PBS NewsHour, which was for the longest time the most serious news broadcast on television, is no longer essential viewing.  I finally gave up on it.  As my mother points out, there's nothing the program reports that one does not already know about from other sources in today's 24-hour news cycle.

That's not why I'm giving up on it. It's because its in-depth news stories aren't as deep as they used to be, and it's also focusing more on the lighter side of the news . . . arts stories that are more about entertainment, "Brief But Spectacular" essays that are neither, plus all of the other stuff I bitched about in May. 

The last straw was an eight-minute interview conducted by Amna Nawaz with writer and cultural critic Nelson George about the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop, which was seven minutes and fifty nine seconds too long.  It was yet another self-congratulatory moment for hip-hop fans like George, who have been crowing all week long about hip-hop having lasted half a century when we all know rock and roll didn't quite last that long.  Rap/hip-hop fans have always been smug (you can almost hear them say, "Hip-hop is way cooler than rock ever was - nyahh!") and for this dubious milestone, they've been especially self-congratulatory in celebrating the culture that negates culture along with its sonic expression - rap, the music that negates music.  This, of course, is not a crime.  What is a crime is that Amna Nawaz is getting paid through the generous support of tax dollars, foundation contributions, and viewer donations to devote and waste expensive air time to discuss such a frivolous topic with anyone.  Public television was created to provide news and commentary from a perspective unavailable anywhere else.  But discussions of hip-hop are plentiful on commercial TV news - just turn on Ari Melber or Joy Reid on MSNBC.

Of course, if there was ever a discussion anywhere on the news of how hip-hop represented the coarsening of American civilization and the need to support music education in inner-city schools to teach kids there how to play real instruments and sing, I must have missed it.  

So that's it.  I'm done.  I'm perfectly comfortable to admit that the PBS NewsHour is not the American equivalent of BBC News and that I shouldn't expect a greater investment in public television to bring it up to par with the Beeb, because I know that is not going to happen.  Fortunately, I can watch BBC newscasts on American public television - a half-hour broadcast on weeknights.  As to Amna Nawaz and her supposedly regular (at least I think he stays regular) co-host Geoff Bennett . . . see you 'round the clubs.

And by the way, Stephanie Sy . . . if you want to take your daughter to a Taylor Swift concert, go right ahead.  Just don't play with your viewers by showing footage of it in the guise of a "news" story about "arts and "culture!"