It's the end of the world... or is it?

Why is it that modern history always is portrayed in the direst of straights and in the presence of some kind of unbeatable crisis? Somehow our problems are worse than any previously seen and we must put forth a heroic effort in order to save the world and claim our spots of glory in the annals of history. Well, this all makes for an interesting and dramatic story, but despite these epic portrayals of our past and our current situation, things always seem to pan out and work out just fine. Take an example from our history, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although the US and Russia nearly took the world to the brink of nuclear war, they didn’t. The Cold War had been going on long enough that if the two countries really wanted to fight, they would have done so already; there would be no reason to start with the missile crisis. Our history, along with current affairs, is overly dramatized.

We are not to blame though; the entities responsible for keeping us in a constant state of panic and spoon feeding us this garbage are the cable news networks. These news networks are businesses, more concerned with profits and ratings than reporting actual news. With intense transition graphics and politically skewed “experts” these networks report the most trivial and petty news just to fill their twenty-four hour broadcast. Twenty-four hour news means that news stations are more likely to make news out of scandals and controversies than report news of actual importance because they have more time that they need to fill. This kind of news is bad especially for the viewer, because even though the news may be dumb, the general public thinks it is important because it is in the news. Take the murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba. The hours and hours spent on news coverage for this story were astounding. Murders are bad and all, but do we need a media boom over something that will have almost no impact on our lives other than causing us to completely insane from the omnipresent coverage of this story? There are plenty of other murders around the world to report. Another example of an overblown story in more recent and relevant terms would be our country’s current “recession”. The cable news networks currently spew talk of a recession in the present and in the coming months when in reality we are no where near such a status. Sure, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is less than previous years, but it still does not signify a recession. In economic terms, a recession is marked by a negative growth in the GDP for two consecutive quarters. Amidst all of this talk about recession, the GDP growth rate has remained positive the entire time.

So what entertainment will the news come up with next? Who knows? Maybe there will be a new threat to the survival of the human race to fill a primetime slot on CNN. Oh Wait, there already is such a story- global warming.