First, let me say I feel sad for the people who were affected by the earth quakes in Haiti and Chile, and I believe we should give aid and assistance to help people affected in their time of need, but I am fatigued by the "news" coverage of the quakes.

When I turned on the news this weekend and first heard about the quake in Chile, I listened for a minute until I heard a reporter ask, "How many people have died; have you seen anyone injured in the quake; is there panic, rioting, or looting in the streets; can you hear emergency vehicles; lets go now to images on a pancaked highway where vehicles have been crushed." The CNN anchor said all this in about 30 seconds... *click*, and the TV goes off...

I guess 2005 was the year of the hurricanes and 2010 is shaping up to be the year of the earth-quake - unless something more juicy comes along.

This is somewhat a long the lines of why I stopped watching the local news years ago. I just got sick of it mostly being a list of local crimes that have occured in the last 24 hours. The worst was always some reporter sticking the mic in the face of some parent who's kid just died, due to a stray round from a gang fight or some drunk driver, and asking the parent, "How do you feel?" To me that is just sick and inhuman, but in an industry with the motto, "If it bleeds, it leads" what else can someone expect.

Sadly however I don't see any sign of this trend in Newsbroadcasting reversing itself. Human misery and suffering will always be good for ratings, and as the News industry becomes more and more crowded I see more and more of it. The effect this has on the population is however very interesting to me. As the media becomes more and more focused on human suffering in its various forms, the viewers over all tend to start thinking that the world is going to hell. "It wasn't like this when I was a kid!", mentality forms due to the saturation of human suffering in the News. Of course it was like that when they were a kid, and some of the times is was worse. Case in point, the violent crime rate in the US has dropped about 50% in the last two decades, but you would never guess that from watching the news.