High On Speculation, Low On Information (Tuesday's Second Hour)

We begin the hour with more on North Korea, starting with reruns of pieces from Dan Rivers and Tom Foreman. John Roberts then gives us a piece that delves into the life of the freaky little dear leader. Apparently people are told he was born under a double rainbow. Um, what? Anyway, North Korea is not a fun place y'all. There are 200,000 political prisoners, public executions, and rampant starvation. After John's piece we have a live interview with Mike Chinoy, who I guess you would call a North Korea expert. Anderson starts freaking out, asking about, "missles raining down on Seoul." Calm down dude. Fear mongering's not cool. Anyway, they then rehash and discuss. Martin Savage rounds out the North Korea coverage with a piece on the demiliterized zone (DMZ). This seemed like it was informative, but unfortunately something distracted me and I wasn't able to fully pay attention. I guess I'll have to wait until they test the next bomb.

Transitioning now to a Gary Tuchman piece on how Foley is effecting another congressional race in Florida. At this point I think you guys know the drill. Following the piece we have Gary live and then we move to a live discussion with Bill Schneider, Candi Crowley, and John King. This is where I'm going to bring up the issue I talked about in the first hour review. Why does political coverage always have to be about speculation? There are about seven or so competitive senate seats and I don't understand why they can't tell us where each of these candidates stands on the issues. They could do one race each day if they wanted. Of course, as my pal rosephile points out, "that would be too informative." And we can't have that apparently.

Next we have a taped interview with John Walsh and Julie Clark, who created a video about safety on the internet. This is basically about Foley again because John worked with him on legislation. It's also reinterated that the internet is very dangerous. I'm surprised they didn't mention the evilness of myspace. I'm not trying to make light of this stuff, but the news always takes an issue and then goes too far. After the interview we transition back to election coverage, this time a Joe Johns piece on the TN senate race. Again, there's a lot of horse race coverage here, but little information on the issues.

On next to a repeat of the lottery piece. Again? Seriously? And then we're onto a fun little piece from Anderson on evil world leader fashion. Suddenly it's like I'm watching the E! Network. They've even got the catwalk music going. Pretty hilarious. I know this isn't newsworthy, but it's only a couple minutes long. I don't have a problem if they take a few minutes to do something silly as long as they present it as something silly. My problem comes when they cover stupid stuff like a serious news story. Well, that's all folks.

Screencaps by sherynroyce.