I can’t help being something of a news junkie, and yet the 24 hr news channels are really annoying. They’ve got 24 hours to fill up; they do it, in part, with creative repetition in which the same story is mined for increasingly irrelevant bits of information to the point of meaninglessness. Having run out of current news they think will sell well, they turn to speculative news. They speculate, in appropriately alarming tones of voice, about what the news might be tomorrow or next week. The more frightening the better. In voices as shrill as Billy Mays pitching OxyClean, they seek to raise our collective anxiety high enough to tune in tomorrow to find out if their dire prophecies have come true. I guess they all went to the Chicken Little School of Broadcasting. Maybe a good economic recovery plan would be to shut them down for a month or two in order to restore a sense of calm reason to the American psyche. And that’s my humble opinion on that.