Whether its CNN, FoxNews, Bloomberg Television or MSNBC, it’s my belief that twenty four hour news stations are conspiring to ruin life as we know it. Five thousand years from now, two foot tall archaeologists with bald heads wearing tin foil space suits and speaking by emitting brain waves are going to study the rise and fall of our great society. They will sift through our rubble and peer at our decaying molecules. And when they do, I know that they will conclude that our demise was directly caused by an unending stream of cable news.
You don't believe me? Take elections as an example. It used to be that we held presidential elections every four years. Around about August, Walter Cronkite would tell us who was running. CBS or another alphabet network would host a debate. Your local newspaper would tell you who to vote for. The citizens would cast their votes and a winner would be declared. And we would all go on our merry way watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island and the Brady Bunch until the next big election rolled around.
But that was too boring. And it didn’t garner ratings amongst the all important "35 to 40 Year Old, Pot Smoking Munchy Munching, Still Awake at Four in the Morning Cause I Just Got Home" demographic. These folks, after all, are a powerful buying group for the station advertisers of important products like Head On and OxyClean. So now it takes two years to pick a candidate and we are treated to cool tag lines like “Rock the Vote 2010”, "Country in Crisis" and "Presidential Smack Down."
Sports are another good example. Before ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, and ESPN to the 10th Power, baseball scores were reported during the fifteen minutes allocated to the handsome sports announcer with the plastic hair and shiny white teeth. He told us exactly what we needed to know - who won the game. And maybe, if we were lucky, he caught a shot of a player dislocating a shoulder after running into the outfield fence.
But viewers weren’t turning in to get the box scores anymore. And blooper reels of injured players were lower in the Neilson’s than the Emmy Award Special for Outstanding Computer Graphics in a Reality Television Show. So now, thanks to the over saturated sports caster market, we get to hear whether Alex Rodriqueze’s second grade teacher thinks he drank performance enhancing Hawaiian Punch when he was equipment manager for his elementary school intramural program. (For the record, he did.) Then the network dubs it "Juice Box Gate" and designs a cool graphic to go with the story.
There is only one group of people more disturbing than the writers who invent outlandish tags lines for serious news. They are the people who think up names for the color charts at Sherwin Williams.
Me: I'd like to buy some pink paint.
Paint Store Worker: We don’t have pink.
Me: Have you tried mixing Red and White together?
PSW: We don’t have red or white.
Me: This is a paint store, right?
PSW: We have Princess Fairy Dust or Pixie Hallow Pastel.
Me: Are you sure that’s not pink?
All of this brings me to my point. (Yes, I do have one.)
Many of you may know that I recently lost a very close and trusted friend. Before “the disaster”, my friend and I went everywhere together. One time I snuck my friend into the movies. Another time, I took him to church and told him to keep his buzz shut. And, if you promise not to say anything to Ken, I’ll admit that this friend and I slept together on a few occasions.
That friend, of course, was my trusted Blackberry cell phone. Poor BB gave his life while defending me and my children from almost certain dampness during a recent camping trip. BB has since been replaced. (Oh Droid, you are the only one for me. Your smooth skin. Your large…..display. Sigh. I love you.) But I still find it difficult to explain to friends and family exactly what happened to good old BB.
So, I thought I needed to come up with a snazzy tag line to describe this important event in history, just like they do on the cable news channels. Currently, my options are “Terror at Two A.M.”, “Long Night, Short Circuit” or “It’s a Really Long Story. Do You Really Want to Hear It?”
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