Whatever happened to the news?

It seems that television has done a complete turn around in terms of what it presents.  There was a time when most entertainment programs were completely fictional, and the reality stories were presented on the television news.  As one can see now from listings of shows such as "American Idol,"  "The Apprentice," "What Not to Wear," etc. television viewers want to be entertained by "real" people.  Maybe, that is because there are so few stories of "real" people elsewhere.

I can remember as a child, having the news brought to our family through two venues:  the newspaper and the six o'clock evening news.  The closest thing to reality tv for us was 60 minutes on Sunday nights.  At that time, as slowly as news traveled, one could depend on the fact that it was "news." 

Today, we are inundated with news stories through the television, computer, radio and even our phones.  How much of it is actually news?  If one were to flip on Fox News (and I'm not suggesting you should) at any point in time, I predict that what you will see is an angry white man expressing his opinions, which are being reinforced by a stuffy white woman and being argued against by an articulate black man who is never given the opportunity to finish his sentences.  They really should change the name of this station to Fox Opinion or Fox Rhetoric...maybe even Fox Propaganda.  All of those items appear much more frequently than does news.

So what has happened with television news?  Well, regardless of the channel you are viewing, you can, if you have good eyesight and the ability to speed read multiple moving lines simultaneously, find the headlines streaming quickly along the bottom of the screen.  These rolling headlines will keep you up to date on the latest celebrity meltdown, Presidential approval rating and weather related disaster.

Speaking of weather...even the Weather Channel has jumped on the entertainment bandwagon.  It is no longer enough to simply inform the public of the predicted weather, based on current meteorological trends.  Nor is it sufficient to report on the catastrophic weather tragedies, such as earthquakes, tsunamis or tornados, that have ocurred.  No, not enough at all.  Now, the folks at the Weather Channel also want to report on what "Could Happen Tomorrow" (insert climactic music here).  No, it's not enough that those things may have just happened today or yesterday, let's raise the paranoia in the viewers by showing them how much worse tomorrow could actually be.  Does anyone really tune into the weather channel to see hypothethical scenarios of the weather?  Isn't the forecast speculative enough?  Do we have to over-dramatize it by creating additional disaster stories that have not actually taken place?

The great thing about cable channels used to be how specialized they each were.  You tuned to gardening channels for gardening, the Movie Channel for movies, CNN for news, MTV for music videos.  Now, you can flip to any of those channels and not actually be certain what channel you are watching.  The gardening channels also have home makeovers, MTV has movies, the Weather Channel has gardening advice and the HBO has sitcoms.  What happened? 

Please, television producers of the world, hear my plea.  Bring back the old school days where someone sensible like Dan Rather sat with us in the evening and informed us of the events that took place worldwide that day, where MTV played nothing but music videos, where the Weather Channel could be counted on to provide us with an actual forecast of what they truly believe will take place tomorrow and where the distinction between fact and fiction was crystal clear.