All The News, But Not The News You See

How come in this fine city of mine, with no less than five twenty-four-hour news channels, when you see something going on which is really big, and you rush to one of these channels, they have nothing on it?

This has happened twice in the past week to me. I saw them close down a whole stretch of highway, and there were red, white, blue and orange flashing lights as far as the eye could see. Clearly something big was going on – but I couldn’t see it all. So I turned on the local twenty-four-hour news channels, watched and listened for at least 45-minutes – but nothing was ever said.

 

When a blackout occurred at a friend’s place, we noticed the whole street was dark, and there were fire trucks, police cars, and hydro crews everywhere. An ambulance left the scene with lights and siren – clearly taking away someone involved in a horrible accident.

When I got home, what did I do?

I ran to the tube, turned on the local twenty-four-hour news channels and watched to see what was going on.

Again, NOTHING! ZIP! Not even a little blurb in those really annoying scrollers that practically yell out at you as you’re trying to watch the cluttered screen.

What good is a twenty-four-hour news channel, if you can’t get news off of the thing?

Now I know a lot happens in a day, but back when I was working at a paper, news was stuff that actually mattered to people. News was happening too people in your local community. News was about the people, places and things which affected you.

These days, whenever Justin Beiber sneezes, that’s news.

WHY?

Will it actually ever affect YOU?

If Britney Spears doesn’t wear panties and decides to spread her legs showing herself to the world – how on earth will that affect you?

But when something happens that causes all the offices, including yours, to send you and all the employees home – that does affect you. Aside from getting to go home early, all those companies – including the one ya work for – lost business that day. There will be missed meetings, projects that need to get extended, angry customers to deal with – these things appear to have more of an impact on us than whether or not Britney Spears is wearing panties.

Still, the news media and their never ending quest for content to fill their twenty-four-hour news stations seems to find lots of stuff to put on there.

Problem is, most of it is irrelevant crap that really has no impact on those forced to watch it.

We tune into these channels for insight into the world around us, but instead we are fed puff pieces that just don’t deserve the oxygen used to voice them.

It’s a sad day, when you see news with your own two eyes, yet all the local stations cover some slutty celebrity and her decision to wear or not to wear underwear.

I think the broadcast regulators are the real villains behind all of this – they regulate and license the twenty-four-hour news stations.

As a requirement of having a broadcast license, each television station must provide the types of content described in its licensing agreement.

I don’t know what the lawyers in the television news business are smoking, but it must be pretty good stuff if their licenses provide for content which is meaningless, pointless, sexually charged, and potentially offensive.

I would hope that the regulators have clauses which tell the twenty-four-hour news channels to carry interesting, informative journalistically sound pieces, which have meaning and worth to the viewer.

But who am I kidding – the regulators probably get off watching clips of Britney Spears imitating Sharon Stone’s infamous leg uncross.