This morning I got to our fitness center and realized that I’d forgotten my headphones on my desk. This prompted me to think “Hmm… for 30 minutes, I guess I can watch Today”.
It was easily the worst decision of my day.
Back when I was in middle school and high school, my mom would have Today playing as I ate breakfast (or more likely just sat there for a few minutes before heading out the door). I never had too much of a problem with it, which is why this morning seemed like it would be bearable. However since I rarely watch network news programming, I hadn’t realized just how far my views and concerns had drifted from what NBC thinks people want to hear about. And for all I know, people do want to hear about…
- … The Republican National Convention. This was the least offensive part and thankfully took up most of the time I was watching. Simple story: The GOP wants Romney to win. The GOP is trying to make him likable by parading his wife out who, shockingly, will say nice things about him. I also got to see a short interview with Chris Christie, who is easily the most badass fat guy politician in north-east (Love him or hate him, at least he generally doesn’t walk on eggshells with the media).
- … Some woman who couldn’t stop her car from accelerating, and thus drove up to 119 mph on the freeway. Yesterday the cops were after her, today she was yakking on TV. Tomorrow I still won’t care about her.
- … Some other woman who drowned after taking “wreck the dress” photos in a lake. NBC had to tell us what ‘wreck the dress’ was (because the name isn’t at all explanatory), and read a statement by her family which said that included this line:
“The family asks the municipal council of Rawdon to work on putting in place stronger security measures to avoid any future tragedies.”
So in essence, the woman’s family would like the government to stop people from doing dangerous things. It’s horrible that this woman died, and I’m sure her family is going through a tough time, but accidents happen. And it’s not your government’s job to protect you from yourself (Even in Canada, as far as I know). If you go into a public lake with multiple pounds of clothing on, it’s possible things could go wrong.
OK, so what was so wrong about these stories? On the surface, not much. Dig deeper, and you realize it’s all fluff. NBC has several hours of content they need to put into their news shows, and unfortunately, not that much news happens (Well, it happens, just not in the U.S. – NBC figures, probably correctly, that Americans would rather hear about speeding Iowan women instead of bloodshed in Syria) (Yea, that Syria thing is still happening).
As I get older I guess I’m getting more curmudgeonly of fluff news. This is why I don’t tend to watch television news – I can get all the content from the headline. Although I should cut NBC some slack – after all, it’s been tough on all of us since Neil Young died.
Photo Credit: Today Show © by annabethblue
