Dear 24 hour news cycle,
Who died and made you precedent? It’s time to suffer for your work and make it difficult to deliver your mass-produced “information”. News should only be delivered by hand-layout printing press (unless you’re a witty blog website serving up hot cups of snarky discourse) and charming, possibly injured hooligans broadcasting the availability of a limited number of publications. It must be important, and someone must be willing to get lead poisoning to produce it. Katie Couric will never develop a 1700’s ailment interviewing a reality television star, thus rendering the information she delivers to be useless. Maybe they lose some hair, gain some wrinkles, and a dependence on an irreverent stylist, but none of them are suffering to inform the masses.
They would think twice about wasting precious energy telling the general public how hot it is outside, how no one has cured a common cold, or about the rent for the smallest apartment in New York if someone had to suffer for it.
We recommend an inverse sickness correlation to the news. The more important and useful the news it, the less ill the deliverer becomes, while news of little value debilitates the newscaster with a infliction from the civil war, known as “Vintage sicknesses”:
E-Coli outbreak in all civet coffee? Water on the knee.
Reality television wardrobe malfunction? Consumption.
Want to tell us a tsunami is imminent? Free pass.
A false alarm warning the public of imminent doom? Trench foot with dull knife amputation.
Anything to do with fashion? Musket wound to the torso, possibly fatal.
Articles like this, this and this would be brought before the committee of journalistic excellence and be punished for willingly broadcasting things known as “Chaff”.
There are things that the public does not have to know. Most of the things told to the general public fall under whatever constitutional law (Who could be bothered to do research?) that says it’s illegal to cry fire in a crowded theater. Publicly broadcast riot incitement should be a crime, so band together in riot-free groups and stop this institutional attack on our ability to enjoy a few minutes after waking up.
