A funny thing happened the other day while we were watching the eleven o’clock news.  We lost sight of it.  Between reading the crawl along the bottom and the severe thunderstorm watch announcements along the side, and the scroll beneath the reporter telling us what building she was standing in front of, we never heard what happened at that building.

Sports scores are the only thing you want to know?  Tune to one of the sports channels and it doesn’t matter what is playing because the scores will be marching across the bottom of your screen.  Need to know if you can wear open toe shoes to work?  Lock in the local 24 hour news channel and the weather forecast is “always in view.”  Did the traffic ease up any?  Turn your dial to the major local stations and watch the live traffic cam in the corner of your screen.

If you have enough time some morning turn on one of the national news networks.  There you will find a split screen with two or sometimes three anchors taking turns spouting something.  A t the very bottom will be a scroll with regular news.  Above that will be a wider band of travel conditions including delays at major market airports.  Focus a bit higher and we have the band of “Breaking News” headlines.  Just above that will be the blurbs highlighting whatever it is those people in the main screen are talking about.  Turn your attention to the left of the screen and there will be a vertical band with the nation’s weather forecasts displaying the high and low temperatures and pictograms of the sun with or without clouds, raindrops, and/or snowflakes for every city in alphabetical order.  Except yours.  Along the right edge is the schedule of what will be coming up in 3 minute increments, excluding commercials.  And somewhere is the time.  Which you are quickly running out of right along with your patience. 

All that information and when you turn off the TV you can’t remember what happened in the world today.  If you should be hearing impaired or just preferred to have the closed captioning turned on, now there is yet another box competing for space on the screen and attention in your brain.  Just because something can be done – a cute graphic for partly sunny or a countdown to the next story – doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do it. 

We’re willing to let the producers of these news shows into our homes to watch us while the newscasts are on to see how we absorb the information presented to us.  We’ll be the ones reading the newspaper.

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?