The Final Solution: No News is Good News

Here are some recent news stories on WCBS-TV, the station which serves the New York metropolitan area whose nightly ll:00 PM broadcast is anchored by Maurice DuBois and Kristine Johnson (and let's not leave out their erstwhile Beach Boy resembling weatherman Lonnie Quinn): "Absolutely the Best Sheets You'll Ever Sleep In," "Take the Hypersensitive Person Test," "The New Face of Divorce," "Doctors Say One Specific Musical Composition Can Put You to Sleep." Sometimes local news can give you the willies. A storm is threatening, there's been another terrorist assault or Trump has just made some shocking new appointment and the breaking story on a local station will concern a stray cat, a postman who was unable to deliver a package due to a barking dog or the vandalizing of bubble gum machines. Yes garbage that is not being picked up, car alarms going off and that annoying beeping that occurs when trucks back up are all nuisances faced by urban dwellers. But do these items compete with the latest threats from Kim Jong-un, the fate of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations or devastating earthquakes in Italy? The answer is fast becoming a grateful yes. If you found local news to be trite, mundane and almost more mediocre than life itself (with its numerous stories about the latest advances in cosmetic surgery) then its middlebrow mix of segments which are more like lullabies is turning out to be a salvo for all the gloom and doom. What better antidote for those who don't want to hear one more word about Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Brexit, the corruption in South Korea and everything that is wrong with the world. You may have thought you had tired of stories like "The Diaper Wars," "Getting on the Bar Mitzvah A List," or "Plumbers Who Are Out of Their Depths," or a WCBS story that just ran the other night, "Long Island Family Unites With Lost Border Collie After 9 Months" WCBS-TV, 2/4/17), but it's a lot better than having to hear about how all the money saved on the dismantling of Obamacare will go towards the creation of a wall.

More...