At the mercy of hotel TV

You know, I complain almost every other week about the problems with cable TV, but a few weeks ago, the Shark family hit the road and discovered the only thing worse than a system with hundreds of useless channels is a system with only dozens of useless channels. Confined to a room with nothing to watch was not a fun situation.

As a sports fan, I usually always have something to enjoy if I must watch the tube, but since I was with my wife, those options were limited, and besides, football was still in the ripoff exhibition season, and ESPN was running the Little League World Series. So I graciously conceded possession of the remote to the missus (Yes, I'm pretending I had a choice) and settled down with a book.

However, it was hard to concentrate on reading as the barrage of talking heads on the TV screen assaulted our sensibilities. CNN offered Rick Sanchez and a few "experts" breathlessly yammering about Dr. Laura being a jerk to a caller on her radio show--like that's news--and acting like it was some breaking story. He teased audiotape of the shocking sequence, then apologized when it wasn't available with a sheepish yet somehow also self-serving explanation about how when you're covering something on the fly, there can be some glitches. Well, why cover this on the fly? Then it became evident the incident happened not 5 minutes ago, as the CNN approach implied, but like a day or two before. They wasted who knows how much airtime on this, and we wasted who knows how much eye time watching it.

On Headline News--excuse me, I mean the oh, so, hip "HLN"--Nancy Grace was being Nancy Grace, and if she isn't obnoxious enough, her format surrounds her large talking (acknowledging that "talking" is insufficient to accurately describe her mode of communication on this show) head with 4 or 5 smaller talking heads, all of them chatting about a serious issue--a missing woman, possibly murdered. Now, I don't want to minimize the gravity of that topic, but regardless of the sincerity of Grace's motives in interviewing the father and giving him a forum, is it really a good idea to segue from that interview right into a plug for her book?

We were spared MSNBC because the hotel didn't carry that channel, but a flip to Fox News revealed a Bill O'Reilly rerun. I don't need to rant about that show; you know what it's all about. But what I ask is, why is a news channel showing "Best of" reruns of a talk show? Bill wants a vacation, give him one. But while he's gone, here's an idea. Show...news.

I realize I'm about 10 years late with this particular gripe, but because of my schedule, I am usually not subject to the ridiculous primetime lineups of cable news channels. So I take this opportunity to ask: What happened to news? A guy on the road, even in a hotel with an unsophisticated television setup, should be able to count on 3 things: adult movies, sports, and news. The Internet killed the first, a lull in the pro schedule thwarted the second, but the third should be a constant. Unfortunately, it's been replaced by inane gabba gabba.

Oh, well, I suppose in such a situation I can always go down to the lobby and get the free newspaper. Hmm, what do they offer? "USA Today"? Have you seen how thin this paper is nowadays? And how little content there is in the sports and life sections? And how watered down the "news" section is? And how...