No News is Good News

Boy I hate the news. We rarely (if ever) watch local news, although when you watch CNN, you get a 30 second or so bit of it every 30 minutes. Local news can be worse, but all of it is the same thing. Andrew is a bit of a news hound-- he needs to watch several stations and listen to the radio (switching back and forth from Rush Limbaugh to NPR) but I hate the news.

I usually try to get up in the morning and catch up with the big stuff, and it seems that when I started the habit, there was more news and less tabloid.* Lately it seems like everything is about some poor kid being killed, or the Michael Jackson trial, or people making a federal issue about a private family medical thing.

It's really disgusting. Local news this morning featured a car accident where a little kid was hurt, a drowned little boy** (who isn't even all that local!), and an announcement of a road closure. Which thing is the actual news? The road closure. That's something people need to know. Not the private grief of a family with a loss or a play by play about someone who has clearly been messed up for years and who shouldn't have been left alone with children anyway. The rest of it is put there for people to be "looky loos" who want to see what happened.

*I admit that I started the habit partly in response to the 9/11 coverage-- for a while after that event, I just couldn't bear to not see if something else horrible had happened. Once we got around to it being less likely, the habit was developed.

**And I guess the story gets bigger play if a child is involved... which makes it even more repulsive for me.