As some of you know I am a Sirius XM subscriber and have been for a few years now, I started off as an XM subscriber and have stayed with the company during and after the merger with Sirius.  I have serious issues with the merged companies content and the extreme lack of quality in it, but I will talk about this at a later time.  The one channel that has always been what I consider a top notch channel is channel 124 P.O.T.U.S., the channel has always been a down the middle channel that just gave out facts and let the listener decide.  Part of the promo that has really rung true for me at least is “Unfiltered Political Talk” and it goes on to say something to the effect of “we play the sound in full context and let you decide”.  Well that all changed on July 30, 2012.

On July 30, 2012 POTUS introduced a new one hour show called Politics Powered by Twitter a show that is supposed to examine the impact of Twitter on daily politics.  I have been listening to this show for three days now and I have some thoughts.  The show starts out by having the the hosts spend 10-15 minutes just reading tweets from political figures and journalist, kind of throws that whole “everything in context” thing out the window now doesn’t it?  After that they interview guests with questions like “Who tweets for the candidate?” and “What goes into writing a tweet for the candidate?”, you know the kind of hard hitting questions that you’d find in a middle school news paper.

Now getting back to the first 10-15 minutes where they just read tweets, this is no better than sound bites that you see and hear all day by the corporate media.  It’s all taken WAY out of context and there is no real explanation of what the background is for the tweet, it’s just 10-15 minutes of what is basically out of context sound bites.

I have always held channel 124 P.O.T.U.S. in high regard for having integrity and not dumbing down the political news with such daily shows as Morning Briefing with Tim Farley, The Press Pool, and Stand Up with Pete Dominick.  But this new show “Politics Powered by Twitter” has made me loose a great deal of respect for the channel and the people involved with it because it brings the channel down to an infantile level, and takes a serious and well respected channel that once had a partnership with C-SPAN and reduces it down to the level of FOX and MSNBC.  If the people running P.O.T.U.S. have any sense at all they will realize what a grave mistake this show is and cancel it immediately.