Does anyone else find CBS News particularly stressful?
I may be in the minority on Tildes who still watches cable news. My mom is the one who puts it on and I'll usually ignore/forget about it when I'm home alone, but I find it's a good way to keep track of major headlines. Also, our usual choice of national news, ABC with David Muir, tends to end every broadcast with some feel-good story which is just... really appreciated in these times. (Though tonight they played a soundbite of Martin Luther King Jr.'s final Sunday sermon, and the choice of that particular soundbite feels very pointed.)
A couple months ago YoutubeTV and Disney got into a contract disagreement though, so ABC was removed from the lineup for a bit. For a while we watched CBS News, and... Something about it just genuinely stressed me out. Of course the news is very stressful lately, but usually I can deal with it. At worst, I leave the room for certain stories that make me particularly angry.
Something about CBS just left me really agitated and stressed though. I can't say what it was exactly, maybe the delivery, or a heavy focus on the worst parts of US politics? All I know is every night I was getting increasingly worked up, the way I only ever did with the most absolutely infuriating news stories, until we switched to NBC until ABC returned to air.
This came to mind again after my mom put on CBS last night since ABC was starting late due to some sports program. It agitated me until I just snapped.
So my question: does anyone else find CBS particularly stressful compared to other cable news? If so, does anyone have any ideas on why that is? And are there any regular watchers who've noticed a shift in tone? I never really watched CBS before, but I'm wondering if maybe it's somehow tied to Bari Weiss's influence given the stuff with 60 Minutes.
CBS news is garbage now. The parent company got bought by the Ellison family, of Oracle fame, and their move with the news branch was to install Bari Weiss as editor in chief, a right wing nutjob who happens to do a better job of sanewashing than most. You are probably better off getting news off of Instagram these days.
No intentions of watching it again. I told my mom last night that I'd rather just not watch the news at all if the other stations aren't available.
I'm just curious about what exactly makes it so much more stressful for me than ABC and NBC, and whether anyone else feels the same. There wasn't anything I could explicitly identity when watching it, and I have no intention of watching it again to analyze it. Just seeing the ticker banner (not even the text, the banner itself) made me feel surprisingly anxious.
I also wonder if there was a gradual transition in the tone after Bari Weiss took over, or if it was always more... I don't know, negative? Agitating? It's had a steady reputation for a long time, and without getting political, I wonder if it may have worsened the moods of longtime watchers who didn't notice a tone shift towards the worse. It didn't feel as openly incisive as Fox News, but the level of stress and agitation I felt watching it... That would really screw with people's heads over a long period of time, which is the last thing we need right now.
Can't say that I have. To refresh myself, I watched a bit of CBS on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ygySTWJ92M), and nothing particularly stood out to me as "stressful".