Anything More Stupid Than TV News?

This blog rant comes compliments of Eugene Mirman of The Village Voice. Yeah, it's more than two years old. Yeah, sometimes we take a while to stumble upon things. Get over it.

What If TV News Writers Went on Strike?

With the writers' strike shutting down most of Hollywood, the Prompter Monkey was wondering what would happen if TV news writers everywhere went on strike. Would CNN's Nancy Grace still be able to preach to the masses and denigrate people on live television? Would NBC's Ann Curry still be able to stumble over the easiest of words every morning? Would FNC's Julie Banderas still be able to mindlessly and incoherently bumble through segment after segment? Maybe, just maybe, a TV news writers' strike would be a good thing. Or even a great thing. It would force the industry to make the people who don't write, and are fully capable of doing so, give it a go. Surely the show would go on. The Big Three networks and the cable outlets couldn't afford to shut down their daily news efforts because of a lack of writers. In the end, the product could actually improve.

Today's newscast producers, especially in local news, are largely out of touch with current events and, to put it nicely, don't have much of a grasp of the English language. Their grammar is awful, spelling is atrocious and attention to detail is non-existent. Maybe forcing anchors and reporters to earn their money by writing their own material would be the best thing to happen to this business. That way, the cream would certainly rise to the top and all the pretenders would fall by the wayside. There would be nowhere for them to hide.