Hirpline News

Watching the news has never really been a pleasant experience and of late it’s become almost terrifying. And it seems like that’s their goal now. It’s been going this direction for a while now but it’s to a point now that responsible reporting is making sure you’re reporters are wearing a flack jacket as they point out their location on a map. Admittedly these are scary times, and it appears as if everyday we’re that much closer to World War III, so it’s not as if the media is making it up. Well, not all of it anyway. What they are doing is, adding flames to the fire.

The other day I was watching one of the news channels, I don’t recall which one it was, and they had two guests on this show totally contradicting each other. Which is fine but, they never even had them respond to each other or even talk directly to each other. One guest was saying how easy it is to bring down a plane, that it wouldn’t take much of an explosion. As the other guest, a former pilot explained how hard it is. That they need to get lucky and place a bomb in one of about five locations, surprisingly he didn’t pull out a blueprint and explain himself further. And did the host take a second to point out the fact that these two were so far off? No, why bother. The goal isn’t to inform, it’s to scary the holy hell out of us.

They seem more interested in having a better tag line then doing something that might resemble journalism. Every guest they have has an angle, either a new book to sell or an axe to grind or maybe a future campaign to kick start. So far this is what I’ve learned; we’re going to get hit by another horrible terrorist attack most likely worse then 9/11 only we don’t know any details, the Middle East is more then a little volatile, no one likes America, and we’ve got really great bombs. Oh and it’s all George Bush’s fault, except for the parts we blame Bill Clinton for. Meanwhile they pretty much ignore the biggest story, just the small fact that of the 24 alleged terrorists that were nabbed last week, none have any direct ties to Iraq.

Tell ya what, I’m going to be your news now. This just in:

• The President of Iran is on 60 Minutes getting better press then Bush has ever gotten (and I’m not even sure if this bothers me) and he’s buying a billion dollars worth of weapons from Russia, working with China and North Korea with the goal of bringing down the US. I’ll tell you this much, he has a much better foreign policy then Bush. Three allies, Bush must be jealous.

• A group of Egyptian students disappeared before making it to Montana, the FBI wants to find them but it’s no big deal. They aren’t criminals but, their visas are no longer good. We can’t show you what they look like, because well, you already know what Middle Eastern college students look like. And we just hope they don’t start taking the bus. That never goes well.

• Fidel Castro is near death, but he’s taking pictures holding a newspaper so he’s okay now. But for a second, we really thought he was going to croak.

• Israel is at war, it’s getting pretty messy. No one in the Middle East seems to like those people. Did you hear what Mel Gibson said yet?

• Oh, we allegedly just stopped a really big terrorist attack. It’s only after an actual attack that we’ll start talking conspiracy theory. It’s not as if anyone could have had anything to gain by claiming a huge attack was stopped. See we’re so cynical here at Hirp News, that we almost need someone caught after lighting the fuse to believe it to be true.

• We have reason to believe most baseball players are on steroids but, we only want to see Barry Bonds go to jail. And no other professional athletes are taking anything other then vitamins.

• Mel Gibson said some horrible things, was driving drunk, and we know his father’s an anti-Semite. But Patrick Swayze said it can’t be true, so we totally have no clue what to think. Did we mention he made over $300 million himself with Passion of the Christ?

Coming up after the break, the end of the world is months away, and great deals for that last minute summer vacation.