No News is Good News
by Scott Hardie on September 29, 2006
Yesterday I spent eight hours in a hospital waiting room in Tampa while my mother underwent surgery for a torn rotator cuff. She's recovering well, but the harm inflicted on me by eight hours of cable news has yet to wear off. It happened to be Fox News Channel, but that's irrelevant; all news is boring when you're in the hospital and are stuck watching it at length, because the newscasters only repeat over and over the breathless update that they have nothing more to report and here are the things they don't know yet. When I had surgery in high school, it was the same day a local school bus was hit by a train and five kids were killed, and every station devoted itself to daylong coverage of the very-slowly-unfolding news story. With all due respect to the families of the deceased, it was one of the most boring days of my life. Yesterday FNC covered only four stories (I counted) for the entire eight hours: A) Hostage crisis in a Colorado school, B) Terrell Owens did or didn't attempt suicide, C) Democrats are mean for leaking a classified report about terrorism, and D) the Dow Jones almost broke a record but didn't. The anchors had precious few details about each of these events and repeated them hundreds of times, as well as repeating over and over again what they didn't yet know. It was enough to make me want to sign up for a lobotomy in the next room.
Ok, sorry Mike, I can't resist one dig at Fox News: While an analyst was interviewed about the classified document leak, he slipped in a criticism of Bill Clinton for picking on his own Fox News interviewer the previous weekend, and said Fox News is a "whipping boy" for the Democratic Party. Yes, that's right, poor defenseless Fox News would never dare cast aspersions on a Democratic politician, because criticism of our elected officials would be unpatriotic and would cheapen the public discourse for mere entertainment value, and those big nasty Democrats enjoy kicking innocent Fox News around for laughs while their day job running the country doesn't keep them busy. Yeah.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
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