A morning without news

ZANESVILLE, Ohio -- Sometime around 9 p.m. Tuesday eastbound at about 75 mph on I-70, headed to a job interview in Maryland, my alternator belt broke. The Mercury Mountaineer I was driving overheated quickly, but not as fast as my power steering went out. \nI pulled off the interstate and called for the tow truck that took me to a hotel to stew over a lost job opportunity and my decommissioned SUV to the town's Ford dealer. Of course, no one in Zanesville would fix my car in the middle of the night to get me to Maryland with enough time to spare for my 7 a.m. interview.\nI woke up around 5:30 a.m. and tried to do without my six newspapers by watching one of three options for morning television news: ABC, NBC and CBS. I rarely watch television news, except "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS, because TV news programs aren't news programs. They're human interest stories programs. This morning's news on ABC, NBC and CBS consisted of five minutes of quick soundbites of headlines like Chandra Levy's murder and reorganizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Then we quickly turned to such important topics as a woman's manicure infecting her with Herpes and interviews with Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman about a new movie. Then it's onto weather and traffic for the Columbus area. \nFlipping back to national news: cooking lessons. Then a so-called story on a story -- a journalist interviewing another journalist about a story about prescription drugs airing later that day. I know morning news on these networks isn't intended to make the nation's citizenry more informed. And polls will likely show these stories are ones people want to watch, but the media has an obligation to tell us about important events and issues, even if we don't want to know. \nSo, Wednesday morning I sat in my hotel room as blind to world events as I could be. All I knew is that we're still fighting a war on terrorism. I didn't know about an important Supreme Court decision on 11th Amendment issues, other cases involving free speech/cross burning, effective counsel and conspiracy law, that a U.S. plane was downed in Iraq, or many, many other important issues that must have failed whatever poll was done on viewers' interests. \nEvening news broadcasts aren't much better. They are full of human interest and feature stories that have little to do with the hard news viewers should hear. Technology could have made television news a great source of information for viewers, rivaling print sources. With video cameras around the world and correspondents in many countries, immediate television news could be heard and seen, not just read. \nThat's what CNN did for the world. But the national broadcast news media is failing across the board. Producers are looking at perhaps installing new anchors to shore-up falling viewerships. \nIn the meantime, I walked around town and found a copy of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to tide me over until the car was fixed for $166. \nI will continue to rely on my delivered paper copies of The Herald-Times, The Indianapolis Star, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The Financial Times each morning. Some say I waste paper, money and time by investing in these everyday -- I don't think so. Of course they come with good coffee and not that hotel version I was stuck with when I woke up.