I also do not care that Ashton Kutcher is replacing Charlie Sheen on that awful Chuck Lorre show. This does not qualify as news. It just doesn't. Did Walter Cronkite report on Dick Sergant taking over for Dick York on Bewitched? No. Why? Because it's not news.
I do want to know when the lunatic, fringe became valid, however. We, the People, used to mock and roll our collective eyes at anyone who claimed to have seen Big Foot. Now when the President of the United States shows his birth certificate, we don't believe him and we have to have hours of television time devoted to debating whether a birth certificate from the, well, not-so-great state of Hawaii is valid since Hawaii obviously doesn't care about the Constitution as much as Arizona. I'm not for bullying in the general sense, but a beat down -- or at the very least a beat back -- is in order. But if there's air time to be filled, well why not fill it with complete and utter nonsense and give everyone a shot at being heard? Answer: Because these people are insane. And I don't mean insane = stupid, I mean insane = crazy. When a homeless guy comes up to me on the side of the road and tells me that aliens planted an antennae in his ear, I don't interview the guy and ask him when this occurred and what the aliens looked like, I ask him if he took his meds. Why? Because that is reasonable thing to do. It is unreasonable, not to mention dangerous, to engage and encourage a delusion. That is not news; it's not even entertainment. It is cynical and even slightly cruel.
Last, am I the only person who thought it was weird that I could tune in to CNN on Friday for the Royal Wedding and tune back in forty-eight hours later to see that Osama bin Laden had been killed? It seems like these two events are diametrically opposed and yet there was one channel for both.
