In case you haven't heard (how is the weather in Timbuktu these days?), Tom Brokaw has ended his run as the anchor of the "NBC Nightly News" yesterday after much to do (one would think that this was really an earth-shattering event and not just the changing of a talking head on one of the increasingly redundant network evening news programs.) The pomp and circumstance surrounding Brokaw's retirement (from the anchor chair not the network...we may have to do it all again when he retires completely) was so rife with earnest bombast, misty-eyed sentiment, and ego-stroking hyperbole that one could easily confuse the changing of the anchor with the changing of a Pope or a President.
And, in case you were spending your time dwelling on less important things (though one could scarcely imagine why you would be), Ken Jennings finally lost on "Jeopardy" after 74 games (and 2.5 million dollars in pre-tax winnings)on a show broadcast, coincidentally I'm sure, just in time to catch the tail end of the November "sweeps" period (the time when television ratings are used to set the advertising fees that networks and syndicates are going to charge) and accompanied with a flurry of interviews with Jennings and the woman who ended his run.
It's a wonder to me sometimes the things that the media chooses to dwell on. World AIDS Day is certainly not as important to them as the end of the Tom Brokaw "era". How many games a guy on a game show won is certainly of more interest than the number of soldiers who died in Iraq last month (the casualty count equaling the worst month of the ongoing conflict.)
Brokaw and Jennings are certainly worthy of mention as persons of passing interest but neither of the events relating to them was even close to be worthy of the amount of air time and press that they got. But maybe my priorities are just out of step with what the media knows is best for us all.
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