Your gritty current affairs program is in a ratings war. You can take the lead by broadcasting the ‘execution of the week.’ Do you?
Now the game shows its age a wee bit. There was a time, boys and girls, when you could watch the news at 6pm and watch the same broadcast again at 11pm and otherwise you got no news. Seemed that way, anyway. I didn’t grow up with cable television or satellite at my house. My childhood in the ’80s revolved around the few hours of cartoons I could watch on a Saturday morning, and my university years were spent with Friends, X-Files and whatever dreck Sally Jesse Raphael, Maury, and Jerry Springer would air to compete with each other for audacity. A news circuit running non-stop 24/7 wasn’t much of a thing at the time. 20/20 or 60 Minutes or other current events programs were nothing I’d bother spending time watching either, but that’s the kind of show this question’s focused on.
I think this card would also need to be updated to “school shooting of the week.” Every week in the States there as at least one of those – most recently at a high school in Florida – and it seems impossible for news outlets to “survive” the ratings game unless they dissect the minutia of every possible rumour as to the shooter and his history. They probe his social habits on and offline. And, they run themselves ragged looking for experts to prop up the mental illness angle and “lone wolf” theory that sells these statistically similar boys and men as an ongoing series of unique one-offs. Thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families but god damn you if you try to talk gun control…Cold dead hands and shit…
I wouldn’t want to be in a career where the media piranhas circle a tragedy and add to the carnage by their reporting style. It’s hard enough for the victims without cameras in their faces to record the track of every tear. I don’t have the right mentality for that kind of job.
One Minion's Opinion 