TVSquad

Who doesn't love Thanksgiving? I'll be enjoying mine with all the usual staples: turkey, cranberries, cornbread stuffing, some weird brown thing my father attempted to make and my Mom's mind-numbingly good meliton dressing. I'm literally chomping at the bit to take that first of 227 bites of homemade turkey. I've gone through three remotes in the last hour.

But I have to come up with something to do after all the food has been ravenously devoured by that wolf pack I call my family. And rather than list 100 reasons for regretting life (because 99 of them would be "Why did I eat that?"), here some things I have to be thankful for instead.

If you're playing a TV news drinking game wherein you and your dumb little buddies have to do a shot every time someone posts fake footage or film for a story, you might want to think about switching to Tang.

Now MSNBC's Morning Meeting has been caught dipping their hand in the Photoshopping jar when they aired rather obvious fake photos of Sarah Palin while doing a diss-session on the former VP candidate and her never ending book tour. Seriously, why is there this much coverage over one book? Even The Never Ending Story has an ending.



Dylan Ratigan issued an official apology to the viewers, Palin and her family for "mistakenly" using the doctored images. He also said he and the network took the weekend to ensure this would not happen again. I guess that means there's one less email forwarding fratboy on MSNBC's research payroll now.

The Los Angeles Times made a rather humorous error in their TV listings and some, depending on what they personally think of MSNBC talking head Keith Olbermann, may not have noticed the difference.

Their TV listings for Thursday listed Jackass in the time slot where Countdown with Keith Olbermann should have been. The paper issued a correction the following day, disappointing thousands of easily hammered frat boys (including me) who thought MTV's nightly cavalcade of nut shots and poo fights had returned to television on another network.

Olbermann was OK with the mistake until one of the paper's bloggers used it as a political parry against him and his network. That launched the MSNBC host into a personal tirade against the blogger and anything else that happened to saunter into the path of Olbermann's angry spittle cannon.

Walter Cronkite's passing didn't mark the end of an era in the TV news business. The era he helped produce and prolong died long before he did.

It's hard for me to ever imagine a time when people considered a major network news anchor as America's most trusted source for anything. Claims of bias and political persuasion being injected into every story with a meat syringe created a thick fog that made it very hard to cover anything with a modicum of honesty.

Cronkite, however, was the man people turned to when something blew up, exploded, imploded, launched, landed or any other number of descriptive verbs, because his goal wasn't to make news every time he stepped in front of a camera. His goal was just to report it.

Is this one of the improvements they're making to the cable network now that it's under new leadership? Not sure if you watch it during the day, but they have this really annoying new feature where you see and hear the producer in the control room telling the technicians what to do, telling the anchor what story is coming up next, telling viewers they're going to commercial. Why are they doing this? Doing it once or twice was a quirky and interesting, but now it's a regular thing? Who cares what the producers say and how the show runs? When I watch a 24 hour news channel (or many types of shows, actually), I don't want to see the inner workings of the machine. Do they think it's hip or revealing or innovative? It's not.

If they want to start putting cameras in the dressing rooms of the anchorwomen, then I might be interested. New slogan: "MSNB-See the hot anchorbabes like you've never seen them before!"