It is now time to ask whether television news has also kicked the proverbial bucket. Some of us can recall a time when everyone faithfully watched their favorite news program each evening. Dave Moore and Uncle Bud Kraehling were fixtures in households throughout Minnesota. Things sometimes got a little confusing on weekends when Clancy the Cop would show up in Dave's chair. We somehow knew that the newsmen were supposed to be serious journalists and Clancy just didn't fit the part. In retrospect it may have been that he just didn't drink enough. Newsmen, regardless of their medium, were supposed to be hard drinking, chain-smoking, crusty old guys who had the balls to tell us what was really going on in our world, all bullshit aside. Kind of hard to think of anyone on the local airwaves who approaches that description today, isn't it? To me the very real question is "Why does anyone watch local news at all?"

Think about all of the sources of news programming available today that weren't around in the halcyon days of local news. CNN. Fox News. The Weather Channel. ESPN. C-Span. On-line services bringing up to the minute reports. Newspapers. Well maybe forget newspapers. They've always been around and if everyone read them there'd be little call for TV news anyway. But you get the point. There is more information out there than any one person can effectively digest. So why, in 1998 do people continue to rely on the Diana Pierces of the world to inform them of the state of the planet? Especially when one considers the fact that for each precious minute of real news one has to endure countless fluffy pieces that would have Dave Moore turning over in his freshly excavated grave. Commercials every six minutes. Forced banter with stiff, uncomfortable looking weathermen every night, right on cue. Mindless "investigative pieces" trumpeted for days in advance. Shameless self-promotion. Really. Why do people fall for this?

My guess is that directors of these news programs would explain things in a different way. They likely see themselves as experts at giving the public what it wants. This position seems to make some sense. Travel anywhere in the US today, turn on the TV in your hotel room at the correct time, and you're certain to see a local news program indistinguishable from any other news show in the country. Look out your window and you won't be able to have any clue, based on the strips of fast-food establishments and outlet malls, what city you're even in. If everything can thus be reduced to a formula and the formula works everywhere then the formula must be for something that we really like. Isn't that right? And if the lowest common denominator that all of this is aimed at seems just a tad low is that the fault of the news director or the retailer? The catch is that if you talk to people individually to ask whether three minutes of news about teenage murderers interspersed with 11 minutes of commercials and 16 minutes of terrible acting is what they want from their news programs most would probably say no. That lowest common denominator thing never actually includes us. It's always those other dolts who drag down the curve and spoil things for the rest of us.

Maybe the problem lies in our standards. If we just accept the fact that local news is only entertainment and stop expecting it to be like actual news programming then we can comfortably live and let live. But this still leaves an important question: If people are now only watching the news to be entertained why aren't they watching something a little more entertaining? It's not like there aren't better things to watch at 10 PM if you're looking for entertainment. That would hold true even if one was cableless and Next Generation reruns were the only alternative. No, there seems to be something else going on here that must be understood if we are to come to terms with the continued popularity of local news.

One suspects that peculiarities of modern society fuel our interest in these news programs. One hint comes from the way in which stations try to market themselves as Good caring neighbors sharing in a larger community. Is it really possible that with the breakdown of traditional family structures and social groups we have become so isolated that we must depend on our news to provide us with a sense of linkage to a greater whole? As we lose common rituals and ceremonies that provide connections with our fellow men are they being replaced by stories about Vikings and multi-vehicle accidents? These thoughts are painful to consider.

Of course when it comes to avoiding painful thoughts we never do so well as with thoughts of death. Most of us manage to go through each day with nary a thought about the very real possibility that we could die in the next moment. Perhaps no society in man's history has been more successful at removing considerations of our own mortality from our everyday consciousness. But we can never avoid this topic completely. We know it's out there and it still holds an odd fascination when we encounter it. Just think of peoples’ reactions when they see even a minor accident on the highway. Drivers cannot force themselves to drive by without gawking to see if some other luckless sap has been hurt or killed. An actual dead or mangled person in sight of passing vehicles is guaranteed to produce a traffic standstill extending for miles. No one wants to pass up their chance to see death. When we get to the office and recount our view of the carnage we're greeted, in some peculiar way, as heroes or minor celebrities. Maybe TV news just spares us the trouble of having to drive around looking for automobile accidents. Like everything else in our life death has become something that we like sanitized and presented in entertaining little bites that don't demand a lot of chewing.

When considering our relationship to death we can't forget the most important part. We like it to happen to somebody else. We like the sense of having escaped death while someone else could not. It grants us some measure of comfort to learn that we were once again too smart or too elusive for death to have found us, even though it was in the neighborhood. While these sentiments may remain out of awareness for most of us, TV news directors have a real intuitive understanding of the whole process. As a friend has recently pointed out, if there are no fresh murders or deaths to report the news will provide images of unsolved murders or other retrospective looks at death. As long as we get our nightly exposure to death between 10 and 10:30 we are free to forget about it until the next evening.