Tonight on the news: Look a bunny!

     Earlier this evening, I sat back and watched the 11 o'clock news on our local NBC affiliate, WRAL. I was left dumbfounded. Not by any news story pertaining to "he who is popular among the poorly educated" or "she who has inherited her husband's credibility issues," but by two YouTube videos. One showed a man and his dog sitting on a sofa,  Not sure what was so funny about it, but, the anchors sure thought it was funny.  The other was yet another video of some hapless motor-cross biker crossing the finish line only to wipe out.  As amusing as these videos must be to those who haven't grown numb to them over the past couple decades, it left my wife and me asking one question: "How is this news?"

     I realize that CNN ushered in the era of news as a business with the 24 hour news channel.  When one runs such a beast, it is necessary to keep the viewer's attention for as along as possible. However, this doesn't explain the appearance of these videos during a late night news encapsulation on a local affiliate. 

     At this point, it would be easy to be cliche' and bring out references to just about every great satire from the past twenty years, including South Park, Idiocracy, and Wag The Dog. However, that's about as much time as I care to use on any of them today.  This problem isn't just on television news.  When I was growing up, My home town's local news paper was considered the paper of record for the region and published stories from around the world that appeared on the front page.  In the last several years, the only news to grace the front page of The Derrick with any regularity has been stuff about the Pittsburgh Steelers.

     The problem I see with all this is that we are living in heavy times, Big things are happening all around the world.  Several countries on the African Continent are struggling to keep from falling back into dictatorships, relations between the U.S. and Russia and China are tenuous at best, and several small groups of religious extremists in Africa, the US, and the Middle East have been staging random attacks (remember the guy that shot up the abortion clinic in Colorado a few months ago? of course not, look at this puppy).

     In his book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury described a world in which books had been banned because books contained ideas that made people sad and angry.  Is it possible that we have arrived at that time?  News in the US very rarely looks beyond it's own borders except to cover only US involvement. Are we as consumers of said news dictating that lack of information? 

     I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this, here, and on Facebook

     Good night and may your god go with you.