Have you noticed a segment called ‘Deals’ or something similar showing up oddly on many of the top TV talk and news programs? It’s like being forced to watch HSN! These shows are now devoting time for selling all these random products from cooking equipment to cosmetics. Sometimes one of the hosts must awkwardly stand by and watch the presentation. There are commissions involved, I guess. A different form of advertising. These intrusions have become annoying, at least to me…
So don’t watch those junk shows.
We are talking TV programs like: Inside Edition, CBS Morning News, NBC Morning News, and others. Not particularly junk shows. Once they get to that segment, I turn to another channel…
Television news is junk. Read.
My wife and I used to watch those morning shows and it started out where maybe once a month there would be some sort of special pricing or newly introduced products that would be interesting to a viewer. Now they all have daily segments of regular products with inflated prices supposedly offered at a bargain price.
It makes it obvious that those shows are low budget entertainment. They provide segments for cooking, excercise, shopping which involve the hosts but are otherwise dull. The only news they offer is yet another promotion for a book or movie with a guest celebrity who makes the rounds and discusses the project. They fill the morning hours with something for people who have nothing else to do. I prefer to read the news online. Some of that is junk too.
With the ending of Colbert and The Late Show news coming out I’ve heard some stats on ‘network’ television viewership. One stat that explains a lot of this is that only just over 20% of total ‘visual’ viewership is on the major networks these days. The amount of ad dollars available isn’t endless, so it makes sense that these shows need to generate revenue in other ways. It’s annoying but understandable I guess.