I love television; that’s surely not a surprise to anyone around here at this point. And I love it not only for its entertainment value, but also for its ability to inform and educate and to do it more quickly than many other mediums.
But as much as I admire and value TV’s unique place in helping me—and millions of others—stay up to date, I have to admit that all that immediacy has one very big drawback: it’s depressing as hell.
Currently, we’ve got a missing airliner, along with a couple hundred passengers whose fate is unknown; a helicopter that crashed and killed its crew; fighting, fear, and oppression in the Ukraine, and other locations so numerous it hurts to think about them. And that’s just the major stuff. Locally, we’ve got wildfires endangering property, a pair of teenage sisters who just recently lost both parents over the course of just a couple of days time, and a missing man’s body which has apparently been located.
Like I sad, depressing, am I right? It’s perfectly reasonable for all of this sort of stuff to be on the news, I’m not denying the importance of keeping the public informed. I’m just saying that in an effort to keep folks informed of the “important” stuff, maybe the news folks could remember some of the other stuff, too.
