Television - Stupid News Worth Noting

By John Dir

In the course of watching television news broadcasts, it does not take long to find something that stands out as exceptionally idiotic, being passed off as important fact. On a local newscast, I viewed a story that was billed as information to help people protect their job during a recession. During the report, there was a picture of people bustling around a busy office, while the reporter rattled off tips that essentially boiled down to the following advice:

1. Get the boss to notice you, and find ways to become closer to them.

2. Find ways to be responsible for functions that are vital to the success and operation of the business.

3. If sucking up to the boss and actually doing some work fails, be prepared to look for a job in another company.

This report might have been funny if it was aired on Saturday Night Live, but it was intended as actual advice from a "legitimate" television news organization. If this advice is the best one can expect from top notch journalistic research, then I will not have any problem becoming the CEO of Microsoft next week.

The story says a lot about the brains behind the television news being served up to the public on a daily basis. If this story represents a look at what it takes to succeed in broadcasting, there are a host of Wal-Mart greeters with a real shot at becoming the next anchor for the nation's network news programs, as long as they give a specially nice "howdy" to a passing network executive. In a true assessment of the information provided, one must consider the possibility that any given business owner may already have enough "yes" men and women to fill all the available slots for that level of performance. If an employee has to wait for a recession to find some vital function to perform for the company, the chances are good that they will be on the street before the recession hits.

If reporting of this caliber can be expected from local television newscasters, how much more disconnected from reality are the people who give us information from the national level? As the Democrat controlled Congress scrambles to decide how much pork barrel spending to add to the bill associated with giving vast numbers of lower income workers a few extra bucks worth of spending money to stimulate the economy, we can rest assured in listening to the news media blame President Bush for why our checks are not already in the mail.

The "new majority" is back in business, ready to thrill us all by the latest round of token television money to keep us hooked up to cable where we belong. If we lose our homes due to lack of jobs and serious economic problems, at least we will have our flat screen televisions bought and paid for with our gift from the hill. If the government leaders answer the call from Kathleen Sebelius to "get to work," they might find themselves asking the same question that is on the lips of many other people in this country, "Doing what?"

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