Silent Broadcast

So for the silent part of the assignment I decided to watch The Glen Beck show on FOX. I'm not a big fan of FOX in general, but Glen Beck is one of the few on the station that I will listen to. If for nothing more he can be pretty entertaining with his wacky personality and warnings of the end of America. So I wondered how his program would be without any sound at all.

I have to say that even with the sound off Glen Beck was still pretty entertaining, if not more so than usually. I was watching him do his crazy faces he does and had no idea why he was doing them. He is very much an actor during his broadcast and this came out more with the sound off. But with the sound off I couldn't really tell what he was reporting on. The first story or bit of news that he was talking about had something to do with the Department of Treasury, because he had this big TV screen behind him and on it was this document that had the Department of Treasury at the top of it. He seemed to be talking about this document because he kept turning around pointing at it. I didn't read what it was about, but there were a few sentences that had been blacked out, which is sometimes on documents that the Government releases to the public. I don't know what it was about, but it took up about half the show. There were also a bunch of clips brought up of people from congress that were dated almost half a year ago and they also showed a clip of President Obama speaking back in June.

I thought that I would be able to read his lips to understand what was going on but Glen Beck talks too fast that I couldn't keep up. The only thing I was able to get out was "Congress doesn't matter anymore." If you have ever watch his show or listened to him on the radio, you would find that this attitude towards the Government is quite common from Beck. After the first story it seemed like Beck was turning to something else when he started to talk about something called re-founders. He started to show pictures of the Constitution and pictures of the founding fathers. Then pictures of the constitution was being shown with pictures and video of congress members of today. With some of the pictures there would be a quote that the person had said about the constitution like how it is suppose to grow with the people. There were many other quotes like that and it seemed to me that the show was going after the idea that some members of congress are trying to imply the ability to change the constitution. That's just what I took from it, but if you have watched any conservative news outlets you will hear every now and again the idea of the left wing attempt to change the constitution for there own gains. But this is the same sort of threat that you would hear from the liberal media like MSNBC, when Bush was still president.

So after Glen Beck was done I decided to just stay on FOX and do the just listening portion of the assignment. I have no idea what the show was called it might have been FOX and Friends, but don't hold me to it. Anyway I found that just listening to the news program was a lot easier then watching it without the sound. I had no issue trying to figure out was going on, the only problem that I had was that I couldn't see what they were reporting on. The first story was about Obama switching the missile defense over in Europe from a land setup to a mobile one. I couldn't see the missiles being shot off, but I could still hear them. They then went to talk about the possibility of Iran having a Nuke, the banned funding of Acorn by the Government, praying in school and a few other stories. However the most important thing is that I had no trouble following along with what the stories were about. I think the only thing that it proves is that we don't get the news from the visuals. They are important and they can add to a news story, but anyone can get the important facts from words alone. Look at the radio, a big chunk of the radio belongs to 24 hour news stations or at least stations that gives news for the most of the day. All the stories that we get are told to us, we don't get to see anything from video, it all comes from the host/reporter. I actually prefer the radio news over television news. There are no distractions like holograms or any other gimmick CNN comes up with, just the news. That's all I really want out of news outlets,no gimmicks, no news anchors that just want to be loud and get attention, no BS what so ever, just the news.