I judge news outlets by their ratio of real news to automatic news and other filler.
Real news includes things like big and breaking news stories, investigative reporting and thoughtful analysis of what's happening.
Automatic news includes stories like "Bush Pardons Stars, the Talkative Turkey." Every year the president pardons a turkey. You can set your clock by it. At this point, it would only be news if the president actually killed the turkey.
Lazy news editors must live for automatic news stories. It's a lot of work to cover breaking news stories, to uncover the stuff investigative reporters look for and to offer new thoughts about current events. It's really easy to cover automatic news stories -- they write themselves (you can just copy last year's story, taking care only to change the dates) and they're predictable (you know each January 1 what you'll be reporting on the Monday before Thanksgiving).
I stopped watching TV news years before the internet. I figured out that the easy stuff -- producing automatic news stories, reciting sports scores, repeating the National Weather Service's weather forecast and offering soft-hitting consumer features -- often accounted for more than 90% of the broadcast. Real news had become an afterthought, often taking up less than 5%.
Even before the dawn of the internet, which makes everything you could ever want from a news broadcast available exactly when and how you want it, I thought the TV news operations had degenerated to one level above an infomercial. Now I wonder why anyone watches them.
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