How can they allow such violence on tv? Oh, it's just the news!

You know the last time I watched the news was when I was on it. I was in the same newscast as Arnold Schwarzenegger (I think that's right), presidential candidates McCain & Obama, and a Kindergartner class's mauled pet pony (the pony didn't make it). The news is quite absurd when you think about it and very outdated since the popularity of the Internet has boomed.

The job of the news is like any other television show, ratings. Only the news is never going to get canceled. People will never stop committing crimes. Disasters will continue. There is apparently so much news that the half hour show from my childhood could not contain everything that's happened.

There is also a multitude of newscasts throughout the day. They have morning news, evening news and nightly news. I once saw the news on at noon. I thought, it's been three hours what could I possibly need to know about. There's also entire channels devoted to the news and weather. If there's anything more exciting than watching the weather channel, I haven't found it. We even have entire shows dedicated to making a parady of the news. There's apparently so much information floating around that we don't know what to do with it.

But we have all these news shows, and what do they talk about? The news always presents, it's most exciting stories at the beginning, advertising what they'll be talking about later. You sit and wade through the gunk just to get to the five minute topic that you thought sounded kind of interesting. All the news has on it is crime. Death, murder, fires and crooked politics. Happiness is apparently not news worthy. If you only watched the news, out world looks like it's on the brink of destruction, like we might not even survive until the morning. It's just so depressing.

And the format of the news is actually quite interesting when you stop to think about it. The news tries to make every story and every "angle" more exciting than it actually is. How many voiceovers or live "on the scene" interviews to they need in one broadcast? They do it because it draws attention. You can tell the exact same story, but if you present it like it's important for us to pay attention to, we're more likely to do so.

This is the anonymous idiot reporting out in the cold and sleet, that nothing new has happened on the scene for the last three hours. Thanks and have a great night!