Balance

Hanging out with the folks for dinner and caught one of the network newscasts and remembered why I stopped, even before they became so Trump-centric.

Story 1: Civil unrest in Beirut following this week's massive explosion, as protestors demand to know what the heck their government was doing by storing 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in a hot, unsafe warehouse. Duration: Approx. 22 seconds.

Story 2: America's Got Talent judge Simon Cowell falls off of an electric bicycle and breaks his back in six places, and is now being monitored following surgery. Electric bikes are now a thing because they're enviromentally better than cars but the electric motor on them reduces the strength needed to power them and makes them a favorite among aging Baby Boomers. Who, consequently, can find themselves with more broken bones that younger folks when they fall off. AGT's season premiere up in the air following injury. Duration: Bit more than two minutes.

A national newscast spent just about six times as long on a story about a talent show judge as it did about the site of a world tragedy. This is why what's sometimes called "liberal bias" is hardly the modern media's worst problem.