Another babbling head joins the fray...

In an ongoing attempt to make Headline News into a viable 24/7/365 "news" operation, the CNN-owned network added some opinion to its evening lineup last week in the person of Glenn Beck, a radio talk show host turned televised bloviator.

Let's just call him "O'Reilly for the blog generation."

I've sat through a handful of segments in his first few shows, and wondered how I was going to get that wasted time back.

He doesn't so much deliver the standard conservative talking points (I guess only Roger Ailes has that direct fax line from the White House in *his* newsroom), but instead does the oh-so-fashionable duck-and-dodge, "can you believe the temerity of these people who don't believe exactly like I do?" routine, set in a cramped, retro-futuristic (heavy on the "retro") living-roomesque set.

Case in point: his commentary segment the other night on the Dixie Chicks' appearance on "60 Minutes." He used his new toy, a digital video player he kept having trouble with, to jump back and forth to selected quotes from the piece with which he used to make the beleaguered point "Dixie Chicks: Bad."

Sigh.

Then he turned to his self-professed "best friend/suck-up," Houston-based talking head Pat Gray, to help him back up his "point," saying the Chicks should be ashamed of themselves because they're turning their backs on their country music roots and fans, and that country music is most concerned with the idea of "family values."

Think about that idea whilst you listen to some recent country hits like "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off" and "Drunker Than Me."

I'll spare you the diatribe about how Chicks fans are completely unlike any other country music fan, hence Beck's argument sits as semi-unfounded. No, I'll just (not so-)quietly lament the fact that in this era where it's so important for news organizations to have competent people on the ground serving the oft-ignored duty of acting as the Fourth Estate, Time Warner and CNN have given mucho dinero and primetime airspace to this yutz.