Mood:
accident proneTopic: "Noo Yawk Stateamind"(2)
Frodo has always liked CNN. Turning on the TV in a hotel room in Austria, after first trying to find out what happened to the blankets and wondering what in the hell that huge pillow was for, is a comforting experience when something identifiable lights up the screen. Frodo might fail to recognize a single talking head and be totally baffled by the accents, but he wasn't as far from home as that weird shower curtain would make him feel. Further, CNN did not originate in New York. That meant that how the Yankees did would not necessarily be the lead story, and "Times Square" would not be identified as the center of all civilized existence by default. Besides, it is kinda cool to keep tabs on the Belgian point-of-view, or the cod crisis in the North Sea.
This evening Frodo was reminded of those feelings by the reporting of a single engine airplane which crashed into an apartment building on the eastern side of Manhattan Island. Now Frodo is not ambivalent about tragedy, and the accidental death of fellow Hobbits, however the story dominated at least half the broadcast time of the major networks' news shows. Each of the cable news channels devoted signifciant, if not all, of their time to the story. What really grabbed Frodo's attention however, was the postponement of the scheduled show on "Hardball" in order to "completely" cover the crash. Hey, it was Robin Williams at Georgetown University, doing politics on the improv!
Had the same terrible accident occurred in Miami, or Cleveland, or Denver, it would've been the final story before tonight's segment of the special series on ingrown toenails.
The answer is not to tune in on a local Atlanta TV station. Without a doubt, the local stations in the Atlanta market are totally controlled by individuals who have experienced complete frontal lobotomy. There is no reporting beyond traffic, crime, weather (ad infinitum), and the latest from NASCAR. The stories are often pulled verbatim from the morning edition of the local newspaper, and always filmed with an interstate highway as a backdrop.
Ah, thought Frodo, I'll turn on CNN. . .Error, Error, Error. . .Paula Zahn (in New York). . .Larry King (in New York). . .
Frodo is going to explore the merits of twisting the dish away from the southeastern sky in order to update himself as to the grape harvest on the slopes of the Alps this year.
Posted by loveysdaddyga
at 9:50 PM EDT
