Chilean Overkill

So, all 33 of the trapped Chilean miners have now been rescued. But of course, you already knew that, because it’s been shown everywhere! Perhaps the producers of 24-hour news channels need reminding that the purpose of those channels is to be able to give a detailed overview of all the world’s main news, thereby preventing the need to cram everything into a half-hour TV slot; the purpose is not so that one story alone can be turned into a 24 hour documentary!
Yes, I know it was a dramatic event that the rescue was finally taking place after the miners had been trapped for so long; and yes, I know it was refreshing to have a story in the news that was reporting something good and heart-warming; and yes, I also know the rescue was a tribute to both human ingenuity and the philanthropic spirit of humanity. But just because these miners have been trapped for 69 days doesn’t automatically make them celebrity idols! I don’t need to know the back story of each of their average lives to date; I don’t need to see every single family reunion as they’re all pretty much the same; and the guy who proposed to his girlfriend perhaps shouldn’t have needed a life-threatening situation to convince him that he was in love!
Unfortunately, by the time the rescues were a third of the way over, news channels had become so mind numbingly boring with their blanket coverage of the story that I was beginning to hope that something bad was going to happen! It would almost have been entertaining if the cable had broken on the rescue pod, shooting the capsule back down the tunnel at 100mph to a colossal explosion at the bottom. Now that would have been worth covering! Or is that just my repressed rage showing through a bit too much? Either way, news channels need to realise what they are there for, and it’s not to bore people to tears.

The Greatest Movie Speech Of All Time: Network

I don't have to tell you things are bad, everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the streets and there's nobody anywhere seems to know what to do and there's no end to it! We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. We sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes as if that's the way it's supposed to be! We know things are bad, worse than bad, they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in a house and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and my TV and my steel-belted radios and I won't say anything, just leave us alone." Well I'm not gonna leave you alone! I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest, I don't want you to write, I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime on the streets. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad! You've got to say, "I'm a human being, goddamn it! My life has value!" So, I want you to get up now, I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now, and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!"