That's right, my name is Johnny and I am a News Addict, I have been an addict for about four weeks now and I can't seem to stop watching, reading or listening to the news. It's weird how that sounds, but the fact is it's true; I can't seem to get enough news, and the sad thing is that I have learned that this kind of intellectual binge means that I have been feeding my brain a lot of crap. It's like I'm doing to my brain what Morgan (Super Size Me) Spurlock did to his body. I have discovered, however, that I can still cram a lot of useless junk into my well developed cerebellum than I had at first thought. Oh, and CNN is to journalism what MacDonald's is to cuisine.
Time for me to rant.
CNN thinks that it can pass of mediocrity and blandness to the viewing public and get away with it, and why shouldn't they? They are the biggest, therefore they must be the best; otherwise they wouldn't be the biggest, right? WRONG! Damn it! CNN has finally pissed me off. I had to subject myself to them for at least a couple of hours a day (I could have made it four, but I also subscribe to Democracy Now! and Al-Jazeera), but it finally dawned on me that CNN's entire staff - particularly that putz Wolf Blitzer - wouldn't recognize honest journalism if it blew up in their faces like an Iraqi-made roadside bomb. I mean, for crying out loud, there are unexploded cluster bombs killing children in Baghdad (go to Al-Jazeera for the full story) and the best that they can come up with is a story on how it's not good for kids to insult other kids. Well FUCK YOU Paula Zahn! I used to get eight shades of shit kicked out of me by bigger kids in school, and that, on a good day.
I think that the desire, of outfits like CNN, to keep our eyeballs glued to the channel with their inoffensive oral flatulence, could be best halted with a return to a single, one-hour per day news program. That really is nostalgic optimism getting the better of me, I know, but I want to turn on the news tomorrow and see something that will provoke me to do more than just spit at the TV in frustration. To prove my point, I submit to you, the reader, that the CBS show '60 Minutes' crams more real journalism into one show a week than CNN can put into a 24-hour day. Mind you, I have my guilty pleasures; including The Daily Show (with John Stewart), and The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC Television. I also love our local news media, it may not be slick, but at least it's relevant.
One last thing: Bill O'Reilly doesn't even rate an insult. I got better things to do... Like sleep.
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