The Best And The Brightest

On the way home from work, I heard radio reports concerning the nine soldiers killed in Iraq and of David Halberstam's death in an auto accident in Menlo Park. After running some errands, I went home and tried to find some television reports on those two stories.

On CNN, Larry King was interviewing George and Babs Bush about cancer, and Anderson Cooper was reporting on contaminated pet food and the resumption of classes at Virginia Tech. On CNN Headline News (sic), Glenn Beck was having a "Debate" (according to the screen caption) on global warming with a right-wing talk show host, the director of a film ridiculing the idea of global warming and a "Republican environmentalist." And Nancy Grace had whatever inane shit she always has on. MSNBC had a reality show about models in New York (apparently, MSNBC has run out of prison footage and pedophiles gone wild) and a Countdown with some pretty stale stories on the Correspondents' Dinner and the Blue Angels crash. And on Fox News, there was comprehensive coverage of Alec Baldwin, Harry Reid's act of treason and the alleged murderer popularly known as "The Preacher's Wife."

Most if not all of this programming was rebroadcasts, since the staff of the "24-hour news networks" apparently knock off at or before 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time. I couldn't watch all the channels at once and left the room occassionally to vomit, but, if there was anything about the Iraq deaths or Halberstam's death beyond a crawl at the bottom of the screen, I missed it.

These networks are, of course, run and staffed by some of the most intelligent, most driven, most accomplished and most well-compensated people in the United States. (Just ask them.) God bless our meritocracy and the majesty of the marketplace of ideas.