grrr

i am so sick of news coverage on television. i don't even know where to begin. how about the guy who decides that it's okay to put an image of a mother and her two children walking across a CROSS WALK only to be run over and criticality injured by a reckless driver? never mind that, what about the guy who decides it's okay to show this at 8 o'clock in the morning? kids haven't even gone out to catch the bus yet and they're exposed to this!? this being a video clip worse than anything i've seen in a horror film; worse because it's REAL!! then the news reporter turns around in her cushy swivel chair to cover a stroy about how violent video games are effecting children. hello?

today, which is what spurred me to pull out the soap box, i saw a man steel some cash out of a convenient shop drawer only to be beaten to a pulp by the two men who worked at the shop. yeah, okay, so what katy? so this; the men are shown on the clip as running around the counter with wooden baseball bats.
i'm not going to get into an argument about who was or who wasn't in the right. my point is with the image itself. put a scene like that in a film (something an individual CHOOSES to be exposed to) and it gets an R rating; yet put it on the news at 10 in the morning and everyone's alright with it? where are the critics? where are the monitors? where are the mothers?

yeah, i watch plenty of horror films filled with rotting corpses, people being beat up, tortured, murdered; but, i also watch the making-of documentaries and commentaries and interviews included with all those films (when available on dvd, for example). so yes, i watch plenty of horror films, but i also reaffirm the fact that they are fake, make believe, NOT REAL. i also have the opportunity to choose when and where i watch these images. i do not, under any circumstances, want to be exposed to grotesque images while i'm at work. i do not want to be surprised by a mother and her children being run over when i've just started my day, it's horrific and unfair to the victims to exploit their trauma for a higher viewing figure. i'm absolutely disgusted and furious with the tv news networks. (one in particular, but i dare not mention it because i have a bias to begin with; don't i katie couric?)

all this violence, death and suffering, and these news reporters are content to turn around in their chair, pretend like it never happened, and cover a story about an auction for a 2-headed snake?!? you have got to be kidding me.

from now on, i swear, it's cartoon network or nothing, because at least the violence in cartoons is satirical enough that even children understand that it isn't real.