Media Coverage of Irrelevance

I'm not talking about shitty local news now, where the most exciting thing they have to report is a wing-eating contest at the local Ryan's. I'm talking about national news outlets. We are currently lanquishing in a failure of a war, our economy blows, and North Korea might try to destroy the world with nuclear weapons, but, hey, did you hear Britney Spears went to the hospital? No, seriously, in the middle of the night! Oh, and also she might be bi-polar and her parents, WAIT, I DON'T CARE. I spent last summer in family court...people crazier than her lost their kids everyday. And the shit they did was way more entertaining than anything Brit has done lately. Example: The mother who's custody over her child was being questioned because her boyfriend, Porky, who, "surprisingly enough" (her words), died while eating a steak, referred to her child not as Jessica (my words-I made it up) but instead called her shithead. Or the ex-husband who accused his ex-wife's new boy toy of beating her, to the point that he "popped her implant." Springer's writers couldn't come up with richer material than that!
My point is, Britney is not the first drug-using, mildly insane, barefooting mother to lose her kids to a father who's only marginally more attractive as a human. Watching her walk into a McDonald's with a pink bob wig on top of her bald head is sad, but it's much sadder to realize that it's some people's career choice to follow her around all day just to get a shot of her picking her wedgie or whatever other boring shit she does. Wouldn't you be crazy too if your every move was tracked on Good Morning America? Leave this poor psychopath alone!

This may sound callous, and it probably is, but I get it, Heath Ledger died. I think it's incredibly sad that anyone has to die, especially someone that leaves behind a child. And, sure, he was a pretty good actor. If every gay guy was as hot as him and that other dude in Brokeback Mountain, maybe all those religious right nutcases would stop treating homosexuals as sub-human. But, really, is it important to our mourning process as a nation to know that he was a chess-lover? Cnn.com certainly thinks so. His family can't be happy with all this coverage, and I doubt he would be pleased either. I mean, if I were to die, I wouldn't want to burden America with stories about how much I loved shopping on overstock.com or what my favorite Blow Pop flavor was (Green Apple, duh...what do you like? Grape? Please.) Let's just let these people get through one day without seeing an utterly useless story about their son/father plastered all over the news.

I'm not trying to be one of those elitist asses who thinks that stories like this should never be on the news and that news anchors should spend all day opining about world events and politics. Although, while we're on the topic, as much as I don't care about Tom Brady's foot brace, I care even less about the fact that Barack Obama is trying to quit smoking. Anyway, it's just that once a story has been reported for a day, that story should be over. If the newspeople need more stuff to fill airtime, I personally think they should just play a bunch of You Tube videos of various people doing the Soulja Boy dance. That's quality TV!