This past Friday I was sitting in the San Francisco Airport eating a clam chowder sourdough bread bowl and watching CNN. Seeing as I was eating, not studying, and home was a few hours away, I was pretty happy. Then this evil sound reached my brain and my ears started to gush blood, and sure enough I looked up at the airport TV and saw: Nancy Grace. Okay, so maybe you live a blessed existence and have no idea who Nancy Grace is. Nancy Grace is a TV personality on the days that she isn’t ruling over the depths of hell. She has a show on CNN which pretty much just consists of her yelling and mocking her guests, callers, and most of the human population in general. Do you remember hearing about those experiments where they would raise children in cages and just feed them and not give them any love or human contact and they would die? Well, it turns out they didn’t actually die; they grow up into people like Nancy Grace. Now, she says that she empathizes with victims, but I have a hard time believing that this creature is even capable of feeling empathy. I wouldn’t ever be that angry even with a live badger clamped onto my nose. It’s like her menstrual cycle got caught in PMS mode. I’m pretty sure that her pre-show ritual is biting off the head of a baby bunny rabbit. She used to be a prosecuting attorney, and if I were on a jury I would put in a guilty verdict simply out of fear that she would track me down and kick down my door holding a shotgun and a crowbar.
But Nancy Grace is not the only one out there. For whatever reason (as with everything else, I’m blaming it on American Idol and Simon Cowell), TV producers think we love getting advice from angry people. It’s like getting your news at your anger management meetings. Have you ever watched that show “Mad Money” on CNBC with that guy Jim Cramer? The show is just this guy yelling out financial advice and berating his callers with the same tone you might use to yell at your dog if it ate your newborn child. I’m sure he gives very sound advice; I just never hear it because whenever I watch his show I end up cowering in the nearest corner and trying to apologize for my investment portfolio to whoever will listen. And I don’t even know what an investment portfolio is. I would much rather get my financial advice from the E*Trade babies (not only are they calmer, they sing “Broken Wings” by Mr. Mister, one of my favorite groups).
But CNN is still the place to go if you want to listen to people who think that the rest of the population wakes up in the morning and eats lead paint chips for breakfast. Apparently, they think that people don’t watch TV shows if all they do is report the news. Although to be honest, I know I don’t. I mean, all the news reports are that society basically sucks right now, and I don’t need that from my news channel. If I want to get depressed about the state of humanity I can just change the channel to MTV. The thing about news channels is that there is only so much news to report. After awhile, you realize you are just watching the same 15-minute sequence over and over again. You know you’re running out of news when you bring in three analysts to dissect President Obama’s stand-up routine at the White House Correspondents dinner. (I would give him a B; at one point he made a joke about Dick Cheney’s memoirs being titled “How to Shoot People in the Face and Torture.” Maybe it’s just me, but the fact that Dick Cheney has done these things could be one reason you might not want to make fun of the man.)
So in their attempt to make the news interesting, news networks have hired outsized personalities to make you feel like an uneducated idiot (then again, watching almost anything on TV gives me that feeling). You could ask these people a question about the U.S’s relationship with the sovereign nation of Durkastanislav and they would rant for ten minutes about how the government is mishandling the situation and what their plan is even though 1.they know nothing about Durkastanislav because 2. I just made up that country. But still, you better agree with what they say, or else Nancy Grace will show up at your door with a shotgun. And unlike Dick Cheney, she always finishes the job.
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