The Local News Loves to Report Non-news Items

Picture a snowstorm barreling down on a Midwestern city like say, oh, I don't know, Chicago. The weather guys have been warning everyone about this thing for days and days and days. Of course, you live in Chicago so you are very aware of the fact that once November comes around a snowstorm is very likely and even probable. If you have lived here for most of your life you might even be used to these things. Yes, they can be a nuisance but they also make the city look pretty for a while and, really, compared to other things it isn't so bad. The day the storm comes you flip on the news and you are surprised to find that the television news department seems to have gone out and recruited new people to send to every far-flung corner of the city to stand on a street corner and report.

Surely this must be a mistake, you think. Surely this means the television news has been taken over by radicals who think it is necessary to place people with cameras and microphones at every corner in the city showing nothing and talking about nothing. As correspondent after correspondent comes on to do a report you watch as men and women, most of them completely grown up, stand in front of a street or the airport and give a report that means nothing. They do this hours before the snow starts to fall. Essentially this means they are reporting about nothing. They have no reason to be standing where they are standing. Nothing is actually happening where they are standing except that people are walking behind them and many of them are making obscene gestures.

This is the state of modern news these days. When the television first started showing news broadcasts they essentially had a guy in a studio reading the news. It wasn't as easy in those early days to get a camera and crew out to a street corner somewhere. The cameras weighed just slightly less than a new Chrysler and they didn't have video tapes then. So, what you got was a guy who told you the news and then you went to bed. From my understanding those early newscasts were maybe fifteen minutes long. Sometimes I wonder if that's the way things should be again.