Less than fifty percent of Americans watch Network TV or Cable News around dinner time. We watch every night, but if you decide to do something else, I can hardly blame you. Does nightly news depress you?
Local news isn’t quite as bad as national news. It’s often rather bland, and heavily focused on the weather. On the other hand, national news is geared to making your blood pressure rise. Every single tornado, car wreck, terrorist attack, plane crash, and celebrity downfall is gleefully reported in excruciating detail.
Our favorite newscaster is ABC’s David Muir, mainly because he’s so hunky and dynamic. Your heart speeds up when he urgently announces, “we have a lot to report tonight.” What disasters are we about to observe from the warmth and comfort of our den? The world he sees is filled with death, destruction and tragedy. And yet, at the very end, he tries to lift us out of the doldrums with a heartwarming story . Maybe some endearing thing a little kid said or did –anything to reassure us that there are pockets of hope in the world.
Some news stations like CNN and Fox News can be counted on to tell us what a horrible president we have, or what a great president we have. Realistically speaking, no president is perfect. See: SOME POTUS WERE A LITTLE OFF @ https://livingwellafter80.com/some-potus-were-a-little-off/re-a-little-off/
Having lived through the Nixon resignation and the Clinton impeachment, I don’t relish the idea of putting our nation through that kind of prolonged melodrama. That’s what elections are for, folks. If you don’t like the guy in the White House, just vote him out of office. It’s called democracy.
But it’s not just the news and politics that gets you down. The really, truly depressing aspect of watching the entire evening news hours is the plethora of pharmaceutical drug ads.
Within the time frame of a mere hour, the commercials will remind about all the terrible diseases you could develop at any given moment. There’s cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and COPD for starters. It seems like everyone is at death’s door, and the only hope lies with some sophisticated, expensive drug that you’ve never heard of, but are supposed to demand that your doctor prescribe.
Whatever happened to all the cheerful commercials such as “I’d like to teach the world to sing?” by Coca Cola? I wouldn’t even mind seeing some perky housewife talking about the best toilet bowl cleaner. Any TV commercial that doesn’t remind me of sickness and death would be preferable to what dominates the airways around dinner time.
If you prefer sweet dreams to nightmares, you might turn off the television at 6 o’clock.