Before I packed up for college this summer, I decided to start watching the news again. I guess I figured it might come in handy if I wanted to meet girls and stuff. I flipped on CNN, whose new advertisements emphasize that they have ‘the most stories per hour’ in comparison to any other network. I’ll admit, I was excited at first. I figured more stories means more information, and more information means more clever little sound bytes or stories for me to share, and therefore means more women impressed with my worldly knowledge.

Since then I’ve been disappointed by seeing the same stories flashed over and over with little depth or attempt to go beyond said clever little sound bytes. I get to see a lot of tragedy each day, but after about 60 seconds the camera pans and moves on. I’m at the point where I’ve grown tired of hearing people holler and yell in the clips of protesters and conflict. I’ve grown bored with the recurring Republican scandals that are going through Congress every other week. My personal favorites of the summer were the stories involving Paris Hilton heading to jail, then home, then jail and so on. What is sad is that people were giving more attention to that than to issues that really matter: health care reform, immigration reform, poverty ‘ you know, those little problems we have yet to solve. It’s not as if they’re important, right?

Somewhere in between the headline hyperbole and the news anchors with the attention span of chipmunks, we’re faced with a nation overcome by media advertising and an overwhelming case of ADD. It shouldn’t be too much to ask for a little more in-depth, honest and unbiased coverage on world affairs that might actually matter. If the ’80s were the ‘me’ generation, what are we going to call the new millennium based upon our (seeming lack of) common knowledge, common sense and the information we share? Barring some unforeseen reform, soon we won’t be able to draw a clear line between a news source that you can cite or believe and a tabloid article. The media has a lot of power ‘ it can instigate fights between people, organizations or countries without great difficulty. With this amount of power and control should come a measure of maturity and responsibility. Ultimately, I just hope that more journalists, particularly on television, will have the integrity to report the news without an attitude, without the blown-up ego and with the cautious skepticism the news these days deserves.