There are many, many things going down the crapper these days, and I've already talked about a lot of them. However, one realm I have not yet discussed that is going down the crapper big time is the news channels and what their "values" are, if any.

Someone of substantial age told me this week that way back in the 1960s, when the news came on there would be a guy facing the screen, reading line after line of national and international news. No buts, no fuss, no nothing. Just the guy reading lines for half an hour. And yet, as simple as these broadcasts may seem, they're much like a virtue these days. No longer can we watch the TV news peacefully without the usual attempt at having us injected with THEIR beliefs, especially when they're trying to skew the information so that it favors that of the government or business interest (*coughfoxnewscough*).

All the dramatic music when the news come on, all the flashy graphics and animations and all the "drama" that the newscasters and staff try to add to the everyday news only means one thing: they want to convince us of something. The more disturbing part of this is that they're supposed to be given objective information. Facts. Cold, hard facts. You don't NEED to convince a person that five more people died in Iraq this week (not true, by the way). If it happened, it happened. All the rhetoric that they use all the time in their newscasts are for things that they're NOT supposed to do. Anything meriting rhetoric is subjective, and since the news use an insane amount of it…well, we can put the pieces together.

Why do they do this at all? For ratings. Yes, as shameful as it is (for them), all this extra drama they add is for you to be somehow more satisfied with the alleged facts they provide. Sometime between the 1960s and 2006, the newscasts started to become less about information and more about entertainment. They want to be popular. They want to have the highest ratings and do the newest things first and in the most interesting fashion possible. But is there really a difference between what they want to do and what movie producers want to do? No, there is not. News are now part of showbiz, and people who want something objective are left out in the cold.

Newscasts are the prime example of how big enterprises in general do not give a rat's rump about the general people. They don't care if we get misinformed. They don't care if we have no place to go for real news. They don't care if they don't provide us with news at all. All they care about is how many viewers they have, and they get these viewers by using the exact same techniques that movie marketing specialists or PR departments use. All they care about is how high ratings they have, or how they can convince people to think a certain way because otherwise, they might question the government or big businesses. All they care about is how they can and should manipulate their audiences.

I have given up on these "newsgroups". I will never watch the news unless it is purely about weather, not because I'm afraid that they'll convince me of something, but because they're so self-centered about what they want and they show things that are emotionally appealing and will get ratings on their side. If they want to play this cheap game of ratings so they can support their hollow, pointless networks, go ahead, just count me out.