I can't stand watching American TV news anymore.

Just now, there was a segment on NBC 10, the local (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) NBC affiliate station, about the so-called liquid armour. How do I start this? First, if you notice the date on the press release cited above from the Army News Service, you would notice that this is actually news that is more than a year old. It is finally getting coverage in mainstream media because, gasp, people are now losing arms and legs out their in Iraq. I'll put this down to American selfishness, where nothing is important when it doesn't have an immediate impact. Secondly, throughout the entire new segment, the new liquid compound, called STF (a suspension of hard nano-particulates of silica in polyethylene glycol), was never mentioned by name except in one sentence during the interview with the researcher, and that was just a glancing mention. The anchors called it a gel, and the reporter called it a "bubbly goo". Right, like we cannot see from the television image that it has tiny particulates suspended in a thick liquid. Thirdly, whoever is responsible for writing the teleprompter script obviously has a low regard for the American public's grasp of the English language. The news anchors kept talking about "bomb fragments". Well, big news, there's a perfectly good English word for those "sharp bits that come out when bombs explode", we call them shrapnel. I was under the assumption that people who work for television stations writing the scripts actually studied Journalism. I guess the nature of our education system has decline so far that even people who write for a living no longer read Strunk and White (or even Zinsser's On Writing Well it seems).

The American television news media, especially the local channels, with few exceptions (certain anchors on CNN [but I don't have cable] and BBC America), are beginning to sound like patronizing gibberish. There's no content: the news are not new, the investigative reporting did not really "investigate", the media are complacent about government censorship (in some other countries, the media would fight tooth-and-nail for the right to show footage of flag-draped coffins of those who sacrificed their lives for this country; and in some other countries, the media would not be satisfied with a governmental ban from reporting at a disaster area). The news are filled with feel-good-pat-on-the-backs and ignores the real issues. Why didn't any mainstream news source pick up on the possibility that fake relief stations were set up as a Bush photo-op? Why didn't any mainstream news source pick up on how Volunteer Organizations that are very much welcomed by the refugees in the Astrodome have been prevented from operating? Why didn't any mainstream news source report how National Guardsmen, who could be more helpful in rescuing the needed, were ordered to stand guard and turn away reporters? And why is it the our government has such an aversion to letting the people see images that reflect the true cruelty of the incidents?

What are the news programmes like in America now? NBC10 (one of the few channels I can pick up on broadcast since I don't have cable), CBS Philadelphia, and ABC6 are all the same. The news are nothing more than idle chit-chats between several anchor-persons who, in what I suppose is an effort to convey emotion and liven-up the stories, interjects the news with silly comments and personal opinions that has no place on a serious programme and thus reducing the available air-time for real news. The TV anchors nor behave more like the anchor from Simpson than people: feigning concern and surprise and joy and relief at every bit of news they have to read. I remember a time when TV anchors were chosen not for their looks are their wit, but for their ability to clearly enunciate in an informing matter the happenings in the world. All that seemed to have gone out the window. Now we have a bunch of American Idol wannabes who tried to flash us a big smile whenever possible in the most demeaning way, while stuttering through the teleprompter script, interjecting with incessant babbling not unlike those of high school girls yapping on instant messenger: "Oh, that's like, so cool and all." Fercristsakes, news reporting is not a performing art and shouldn't be. If you want to be witty, go be a stand-up comic. If you want to look sharp, join N'Sync or become a movie star. I will forever remember the days when watching Peter Jennings on World News Tonight was a pleasure: I love being informed of the news by a man who has a poker face that is reassuring, detached, and concerned at the same time. There will be no changes, no surprises. Peter Jennings will just look like that, tragedy or relief, war or peace; all I need to worry about is listening to the headlines delivered crisp and clear, simple to understand yet in sophisticated but not flourished language. There's no nonsense like eye-candy or the "human element". If I wanted those I would have gone to see a Broadway show.

William Lloyd Garrison once said: "I will be as harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice... I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." How many in the mainstream media nowadays can claim that they live up to the standards set by Garrison, and embodied in greats like Walter Cronkite or Peter Jennings?

Update 09-15: related posting on boingboing.