What goes on at 10PM

I hate the news. A category 5 hurricane nears the coast, thousands could die, millions of dollars in property damage, and what’s happening in the newsroom? The anchors are salivating: "Please make landfall, please make landfall". They’re dying for a story, a story others pay for. But cut the sensationalism; that’s the side of the anchors’ personalities we never get to see.

The networks, in their struggle for viewers, have to set their news programs apart from the pack. If it were just about reporting news, what would draw you to CBS over NBC, FOX, CNN, UPN, etc? The anchor personality was invented. The "early days of television reporting" (before I watched the news), Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and any other older male personality were chosen as newscasters because they were faces you could trust to be honest. The late night news team was a crafted ethnic and gender balance to earn the trust of all races and sexes. But today, trust isn’t enough in an anchor, they also have to be good people. News must be a feel-good experience. Enter Anderson Cooper hugging people around the globe.
I watched Katie Couric for the first time last night in her interview with Michael J. Fox (at the gym). Before a commercial break, Katie had a little one-on-one with the viewers and "in the interests of full closure" revealed that her father has Parkinson's Disease and that she too has donated to Parkinson's foundations. Her brown-nosing of the American public (esp. anyone who has had disease in their family) really warmed my heart. "In the interests of full disclosure" used to be a measure to guarantee honest reporting. Now all it guarantees is that I am not missing anything by getting my news off the Internet.

(Full disclosure: I don’t watch the news, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about)