For quite some time, my wife and I have enjoyed watching some of the early morning “news” programs put on every weekday morning by the networks. You know the ones I’m talking about on CBS, NBC, ABC, and now Fox and CNN, and I suppose other cable networks.
And for quite some time, we have appreciated the chance to get to know the morning personalities that are the mouthpieces/faces for each network. I say “get to know” because they almost seem like friends who come into our home each morning.
But in the last couple of years, we finally woke up to the fact that this morning “news” stuff really is far, far, FAR more entertainment and advertising than it is news. For example, this morning on NBC’s offering they kept bouncing back and forth from their NYC location to Orlando, hawking the latest Orlando vacations and tourist traps getting ready to open this spring.
What really tipped the scale for me today wasn’t so much their palaver for Orlando, but rather the time they devoted to interviewing a young actress 1) totally unknown to us, and, 2) who plays a supporting role in a TV medical drama we’ve never watched.
Toss in their usual round of recipes and fashion displays, and before you know it there’s really no news.
I’m not sure why that irritates me as much as it does. I’m probably just mis-remembering the lack of news content on such shows all along. But it sure seemed to me that they used to be more news and less entertainment. Ah, well, it’s probably just me!