ugh, morning news

The summer is coming to a close which means that soon I'll be molding young minds again. It also means that I'll have to drag myself out of bed before 9am (three hours before, actually) and will most likely be watching the morning news shows. This morning, thanks to my required presence at a faculty meeting,* I got a taste of what's to come. On the BBC World News was an informative run down of: the conflict in Sri Lanka, Kofi Annan's visit to Israel, legislation concerning Chinese sweatshops, and the notice that Google may soon offer classics of English Literature available for free download. And that was within the first fifteen minutes. Then I got the idea to compare our own morning news programs and see what they were running between 8am and 8:30. Good Morning America, once they had covered the SUV hit-and-run in San Francisco, had a segment titled Moms Make it Work which was all about how moms don't have to have an office job anymore in order to have a career. They can now work from home selling time shares or counseling people who need to improve their credit. Of course, this kind of job is great for moms, military spouses, the disabled. (Men? No way.) The Today Show had a segment called Today Throws a Wedding, a series they've done for several years now in which an engaged couple have every aspect of their marriage voted on by Today's viewing audience, cake, rings, the bride's dress, the honeymoon location, everything. They were in the process of choosing the happy pair by having them play The Nearly-Wed Game.

I've gotta agree with BebeMoche, aren't the media, our primary source of information, concentrating on the wrong things? And how can we possibly get our media to focus on things that affect us and matter? Perhaps I'm just thinking about this all the wrong way. After all, network television and most magazines are just shiny things to attract our attention long enough for advertisers to wave something in front of us. It's like the hypnotist's swinging watch leading us to a suggestive state. I suppose that it's the responsibility of the concerned citizen to be active and seek out more reliable sources of information. It would just be nice if those sources were as conveniently available as network television.

Yes, I know I've bitched about this before.

* It actually wasn't a full faculty meeting, it was only a small group of volunteers working on a specific issue our school wants to solve. I was concerned about the meeting since there are two people involved, each of whom I consider to be a consummate pain in the ass. Having one of them involved is problematic enough, having them both... whatever! They spent the entire time trying to one-up each other and prove each other's idea less worthy. Their ideas were never mutually exclusive, but they couldn't let each other's ideas stand without trying to tear them down. It was so fucking tedious.