Dear Major News Networks,
I prefer to get my news from your evening news broadcasts because I don't have time to read the news during the work day, and especially don't need the bias of Facebook (pardon the irony that I'm posting this to FB during the workday about how I don't have time...yeah). That being said, I'd like to lodge a serious complaint and recommend a change to your schedule.
My wife does not appreciate the egregious level of violence you depict on TV during the news. I understand that this is 'Murica and not Europe, thus we can show murder live but not nipples in a medical documentary, and you need shock value for attention because your "old media" broadcast is in competition with the internet for viewership... But the fact is when the TV's on, my whole family sees it, and sometimes even I don't care to see that first-person Twitter/Vine of people being shot in the street for the reason du jour from 10 feet away. BTW if you were wondering why people in 'Murica have such a gun violence problem, it's probably because we show real crap like this on TV and it looks surprisingly like playing a lo-res version of Call of Duty which is obv fiction to our generation, but I digress.
Fact is, I'd like to be able to have some discretion about what kind of news I'm about to see on the TV, it's harder to control than the internet. And let's be honest, not a lot really goes on in the world every day, yet you're constantly jumping to be the first to report anything and everything, Balloon Boy lessons be damned. But I do want to know the political news without endangering my poor wife's emotions and children's psychiatric futures. We can kill two birds with one stone here by simply showing the news on more of a daily digest schedule, sorted by category, and then we as viewers can just avoid the days that feature the topics and material we'd rather not face.
On Mondays, we are back to the grind, it's all business and no fun, no one likes Mondays. So let's cover Murica's business that day: "War in Other Countries". I want to see a map, and you can just give cumulative totals for the x,xxx Arabs that died and yy Americans that got injured and/or killed for the week. You're welcome to show the graphic footage if you must, but I'd appreciate saving it for the back half of the show, I mean let's be real, you're trying to "entertain" here, but I want news. Just give me the deets from 6:30-6:45pm, then roll the phone cams for the rest of the half hour. My wife leaves for work by 6:40 anyway, so she can miss the violence, and I can change the channel to spare my kids. Oh, and the in-depth story about the one "lucky" American who died that week that you picked to do a cover story on, save that for Friday (see below).
On Tuesdays, let's knock out the "Terror Everywhere Else". But again, just save it up and give me the digest from the week before, at least I'll know what to expect to see on Tuesday nights. There's usually only one of these a week anyway, you know, San Bernadino, Paris, a subway in London, yada yada. Rather than have us gasp while staring at a complete lack of details, I can wait a week while you gather real information. I'd rather you spent the week figuring out what their nice and happy name was before they changed it after spending too much time on "radical" websites and what not, take some time to find a good before & after beard pic, and get a full record of all those times Homeland/FBI neglected to arrest them from a few years ago. If there weren't any Muslim threats that week, don't forget that terrorism can be domestic too! I'm sure there's a school, theater, or government building full of people who got bombed or shot up otherwise. Same rules apply, just replace "before & after beard" with "mostly spent time to himself alone", and "FBI neglected to arrest" with "legally purchased a gun on (date)", find and replace "Islam" with "mental illness" (not that I want to liken the two, but somehow that's always the motivation... and I don't know why you need a week to figure that out, seems like a canned response anyway). And again, please hold all the amateur video of people actually getting killed until the last 15 minutes or so.
On Wednesdays, let's get the rest of the worst out of our system, we can call it "Hump/Discrimination" day. This will be the day to post the summary of the unarmed black guy or kid that got killed by excessive force from a white officer the week before, and by this time hopefully you've accumulated all the previous strikes against both that officer and the victim, and please try to be fair and get both a happy and a sinister pic for both parties from now on. By waiting a week to post rather than plaster it everywhere before any facts could be gathered, you might give people some time to cool down a little, which may prevent a few of the smaller riots from happening, and with any luck, a jury might have gotten together and a trial could be underway already. Since the Wednesday theme is kind of about "rights" and "not being respected", this is a good time to follow-up on any "ban guns" or "not all Muslims" angles that came about on Monday and Tuesday. Fill the rest of the time slot with stories about lingering prejudice toward homo/trans/multi/fluidsexual unions, cyber-bullying, secret funding of politically-charged causes by seemingly neutral corporations, and the like.
Now on Thursdays, I like to start my weekend early, so let's switch to something more light-hearted: "Politics". The next election seems perennially relevant to you, seeing as how despite the fact that a presidential election only takes place every 4 years, you - and especially the republicans - have been talking about the 2016 election every week since 2011. While I'll admit I always find that enjoyable, honestly in a single week, not much happens on the political front, I think you could consolidate it to one good day a week. Heck, even in the course of a year, it winds up being all hot air, and the lead elephant rotation is about as reliable and relevant as Ryan Seacrest's weekly Top 40. But that aside, I'm sure a good 30-minutes of sound bytes could be scraped together each week between the 30+ presidential hopefuls on that side, and nothing gets me giggling like short-sighted, one-sided, blanket statements from a bunch of old men and the occasional woman who's totally out of touch with reality, one after the other. I mean seriously, this rivals Big Brother in terms of intelligence per interview, it's hysterical, and I LOVE the drama!
For Fridays, people are pretty much done and don't want to think anymore, after a week like that. This is where you can dump all your "human interest stories", you know, the pieces you do in the last 4 minutes of an episode, usually? The stuff I usually read about on Facebook and saw on YouTube two days prior? About the dog that was still waiting for his master after 16 years of sitting on a porch, or the 8 year old girl who wrote a cute petition to her principal urging her classmates to share things, the old lady who plays Rock Band and/or DDR with her great-grandkids, high school boy who made a full court basketball shot, factory workers in America making real 'Murican goods for real 'Murican jobs, blah blah blah. Yeah, you're not any later to the party by putting it off until Friday, and it's fluff anyway, so... just save it for Friday. Including that story about the soldier's poor family who survived him on Monday, and any democratic political events that you didn't get to on Thursday (but I mean actual news, not like a personal email usage scandal, that goes under GOP comedy Thursday).
If you had any real news stories that didn't get covered during the week, like how we're causing the weather or economy to slowly kill us and are too dumb to acknowledge it, those should take precedence on Friday though, and you can push the rest of this "viral video" drivel to the weekend. Yes I know, you should be so lucky as to have any viewers on the weekend anyway, and that's kind of the point. People watching the news on the weekend have nothing better to do and are either looking for fluff entertainment or something to help them sleep anyway, so "On The Road" really has a best fit there.
Sincerely,
Old Media Dad
