I read the local newspaper, on average, twice a week. Once is Wednesday, when the free copy goes out to all households, and the other is Friday, when the Yard Sale listings are in the classifieds. I no longer bother to purchase the regional paper, The News and Observer. Although I used to watch hours of CNN at a time, I rarely turn them on for more than minutes, these days. Long gone from my news consumption routine are the local and network TV news.

TV news has become the bottom of the news barrel. Depending on the channel, the local news shows provide either one half or one full hour of news from the local station, followed by a half hour of national network news. If I decide to invest the hour and a half of time to watch one of the most popular station's news in one evening, I'll come away with around 15 minutes of useful information.

Let's start with the local news. They'll lead off with major stories each evening. There are usually 1-3 of these. If there's one, it's usually something worthy of leading off the show. If there's three, one of them is a throwaway. Going into the first commercial break, there will be a tease for some interesting story that will be later in the show. For the rest of the show, there will be 2-3 useful stories, each of which will be given approximately 10-15 seconds of news time, which is enough time to tell you absolutely NOTHING about the story.

The rest of the local news will be filled with stories about bake sales, cute dogs, "on your side" stories about how the station helped a homeowner get their house repaired after some contractor messed it up, shopping tips, advocacy stories, and national news. As horrid as the rest of it is, the national news during a local news show really irks me. As soon as the show is over, I'm going to be getting a national news show. Don't waste my time during local news with national stories. You don't need Washington correspondents, stories from California or man-bites dog stories from Tuscon. Oh, and unless you're talking about the 82nd Airborne, or another unit from central North Carolina, I don't give a crap about any story your correspondent in Bagdad is telling.

Local News should be Local. Local News should be NEWS. I've found that I can get all the local news that's worth reading in 5 minutes by simply visiting the websites of WRAL TV5 and The News and Observer. On each site, I read 2-3 stories and the politics columns of the N&O, and I'm done. It isn't that I don't WANT more local news, it's just that I can suck all the good out of what they offer in that amount of time. Instead of an hour and a half, I get the local news in 5 minutes. That's a sad commentary on what they offer.

Oh yeah, that story they're going to tell you later in the show that's so interesting they're going to drag you through the whole show to get there? It's probably a few pictures from space, newly released from NASA. They'll show 2-5 pictures, and in the amount of time they've wasted getting you there, you could have gone to the NASA website, and viewed the whole collection of 12-100 pictures at much higher resolution.

National network news is no better. They've got 30 minutes to give me all the important national news. What do I get? I get 8-10 seconds of attention for each of 2-3 leadoff stories, and up to 30 seconds on one major lead story. This paragraph contains as much information as you can get in 8-10 seconds, to this point. The 30 seconds of attention they give to one of the lead stories is enough time to give a completely misleading picture of what happened, and not nearly enough time to get at any real truth.

Further into the show, we get news based on the latest press releases from liberal advocacy groups who want us to believe that the environment is being destroyed. We get stories that cause fear and loathing. There'll be one story on why the economy is causing trouble for someone. If the economy is bad, it'll be someone out of work. If the economy is good, it'll be someone who is in some odd situation that keeps them out of work. There will be quotes from the latest press release of some advocacy group or two, and it will cause fear and loathing. There may be another long-format story, probably of the "Is our children learning" genre.

This being the national news half-hour, there will likely be a variety of stories that are actually local news, but from around America. There's the murder is California, the weather in Oklahoma (did you know they had tornadoes there?), the homeless problem is New York (during Republican administrations only), and a street festival somewhere in flyover country. There'll be coverage of a 12 person protest against conservatism that's shot in closeup to make it look big, or of a 100 person protest against liberalism that's shot from afar to make it look small.

What do I blame for the horrible quality of television news? I blame women. TV news used to be made up of what we call "hard news." As such, it was primarily the viewing domain of men. Sure, women watched, but it was men who made up the primary audience. The problem was, men watched the news, but women did the shopping. Advertisers knew that the news hour allowed them to reach more sets of eyes, but it wasn't necessarily the eyes that spent the money in the grocery stores. The news shows had to do something to get more women to watch the news, to make the advertisers happier.

Television people only really know one answer to the problem of how to get women to watch. That answer is stupidity and emotionalism. Look at what the TV for women channels concentrate on for their audience. They choose mindless entertainment and heartstring-tugging dramas to attract women, apparently in the belief that anything too challenging is above their heads. The news people chose the same tactics. That's why we have the cute dog stories, the advocacy-fear stories, the shopping tips, the recipes, and the movie reviews. Hard news, they think, is too much for a woman, so they water everything down. It's horrible for people who like the news, and it's really insulting to women.

If I were in charge of a local TV newscast, I'd do things differently. Of course, I'd be fired immediately. First, I'd lead off with the most important 3 stories. There would be a 5 second introduction for each of the stories, followed by a one-minute weather segment and a 30 second sports segment. After the first commercial break, I'd have in-depth coverage of 30 seconds to a minute for each of the three lead stories. After that, I'd have the secondary news stories until the second commercial break. After that break, there would be one and a half minutes each for weather and sports. The rest of the show would be 1-3 in-depth stories from the investigative teams, and I'd lead out with a cute or uplifting quickie. In one half-hour, I'd cover the local news better than any of the hour-long shows do now. If they want to have insulting girlie-news, they can do it for another half-hour before my show starts.

That's my rant on news.