about time...

Ha. Glad to see I'm not alone in my view of television news. I usually try to ignore the generic brain-draining Microsoft "homepage" that persists in appearing on my screen, but this article caught my eye and was good for a laugh. Good for the people: finally realizing, for at least a second, that they're not slaves to imbibing without opinion whatever appears on their TVs. Way to go: now, just turn it off, and take a deep breath, and step outside your door, and see all the beautiful things people are doing in your own community, in the REAL world...

NEW YORK - Between the drumbeat of bad economic stories, two wars and a winter that won't quit, NBC's Brian Williams knows he's been anchoring a depressing "Nightly News" for a depressed audience.

Still, even he was shocked at the thousands of responses he has received in less than two days after asking viewers to suggest some good news to report.

"I'm looking at a stack of printed e-mails," Williams said Friday. "We have more stories than we could humanly cover if we combined all three network newscasts. It's hit an unbelievable nerve."

Williams said he's been hearing it repeatedly from people he meets on the street or viewers who send e-mails: The news is so bad every night that it's a burden to watch. Wrote one viewer: "We all know it's bad, but the news makes us feel like crawling under a rock."