And speaking of the fact that the TV news sucks

After a quick Google, I found out that there are lots of stories about how much the news sucks... With all these sources, I feel like someone should write a college thesis on the subject. Here are a few of my favorites:

• TV News Skews Viewer Perception of Threats to Life and Limb

• The news media unduly connects youth to crime and violence and that youth of color are overrepresented as perpetrators and underrepresented as victims of crime

• Latinos are underrepresented on TV - "A measly 1 percent of the total national TV evening news programming was devoted to coverage of 10 percent of the United States population".

• TV news anchors don't talk straight

• Fox News the 24hr Republican Network - many stories of their bias

• The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War

• The Darfur genocide story is not told on the news

• TV news ignored prohibited lobbyist contributions to DeLay

I also found an article about the fact that TV shows / movies have a disproportionate number of heart attacks portrayed. MSNBC questions if the nightly news is on it's way out (the answer is yes). And the Media Research Center sounds like the name of a nonpartisan watch group -- OH NO it's crazy conservatives at it again. Scary.

I also know there was a news story about a month ago that talked about the fact that the nightly news runs very few "real" stories on health riks - most of the stories on the news are over dramatized snippets (most running less than 15 seconds) that don't give the public any good information on real health risks. I tried googling this and couldn't find it - that's the 2nd thing I haven't been able to google today - bad day.