A 24-Hour Human Interest Story

This is the first post here, and it was inspired by (and copied from) an email I wrote today. "Holy shit," I thought as I finished off the message to a college buddy, "this would make an excellent blog entry. If I had a blog."

Now I have a blog, and I shall use it to rant.

As you probably know, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died last night. When I woke up today, I felt like seeing what some political insiders had to say about it and about who might replace him and when... so I turned to CNN and the rest (FOX News, MSNBC, etc.: the jewels of the Cable TV Empire). As bad as these networks may be at providing news per se, they're usually very good about getting a bunch of people to talk about whatever news they do report, and many of these people are either intelligent or important (sometimes both!).

I found nothing. Every news network was showing footage of hurricane wreckage with some anchor commenting on it without actually providing information. The one short bit on Rehnquist that I did see was an anchor interviewing someone who didn't seem to know any more than anyone else, and the two of them were splitting time in a small box on the left side of the screen while uninformative hurricane wreckage occupied a larger box on the right. What a fucking outrage - not to mention an insult to the late Rehnquist.

It's the OJ trial all over again! Although this time the story is important, it's in a way worse: the hurricane story is rather deep, with political, economic, and cultural implications worldwide, but the networks, despite round-the-clock hurricane coverage, don't even scratch the surface. It's all about the rescue and relief efforts - I do care about these, but ten to fifteen minutes of evening coverage could get me all the important information concerning their progress. Essentially, it's a 24-hour human interest story on three channels
every day. And people are eating it up!

That said, the whole thing is quite the tragedy, and I don't mean to belittle it. But I don't need to tell you that; just tune in to CNN.

Briefly.