My favorite TV show is Inside Edition, hosted by Deborah Norville.  As news goes it's snack food, but entertainment has blended with the news media these past two decades.  By the time MSNBC was devoting entire news hours to the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton relationship in the late 1990s, the phenomenon I call Scaz had grown into unhealthy bloom.  Scaz, a nonsensical term I coined many years ago, is the interlocking of news reporting for entertainment and rating purposes.  In short, Scaz uses human societal chaos to generate profits for corporate-run entertainment and information distribution machines.  Getting people to watch news in a constantly competitive environment necessitates, to some degree, the magnification of non-events into "stories."
     The three big cable news networks, CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC, in spite of their ideological differences, are all dedicated primarily to satisfying their stockholders and making money.  All three networks are referred to as purveyors of "the twenty-four hour news cycle," an Orwellian term meaning they give out news to information-hungry viewers all the time.  In fact, since approximately fifteen minutes of each hour of programming on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC is dedicated to broadcasting ads, the alleged twenty-four hour news cycle is really eighteen hours per day.  Erectile dysfunction in handsome baby boomer men is not news. 
     Even eighteen hours per day to play with should generate some interesting and informative news programs, but what do we get?  I recall a story from about five years ago that could be called "Balloon Boy Hoax."  An "eccentric" father and inventor in Colorado had a little son who reportedly went missing inside the carriage of an experimental balloon that took off into the air.  It seemed like the premise of the climactic moments of a Lassie movie.  All three cable networks covered this potentially tragic story from morning until late in the afternoon, when the family revealed the little boy had been found on their property, safe and apparently unaware that the news-gathering organizations of three powerful corporate entities had spent hour after hour speculating about the boy's fate.  The silver balloon drifted smoothly over the flat eastern Colorado countryside, coming down, finally, without a dead boy inside.  All well and good.
     The next day, the little boy and his family were interviewed via satellite by Meredith Vieira.  The family was still regarded sympathetically by journalists and Americans generally.  The interview was characterized by the "Balloon Boy" throwing up on camera.  This hurl by an instant celebrity was shown on news networks over and over again.  I didn't see Vieira's interview when it played, but I saw the vomiting on a loop on MSNBC that afternoon.  I am not kidding.  They showed that little kid puking five or six times in a row.  It was news.  It was Scaz.
     I like Inside Edition because it lacks the pretensions of "serious" news networks.  Each show, lasting about twenty-two minutes without ads, covers a variety of topics: unrest in Ferguson, Pam Anderson's revelations about being raped when young, the death of Robin Williams, scams on consumers, how to properly perform the Heimlich Maneuver, how to perform it on yourself when alone and dying, what's going on with ISIS.  If you leave the room to get something to drink, by the time you return the story you were watching will have ended and the next one will be almost over.
     Each story ends with a synthesized orchestral sound.  It doesn't matter what the story is--the latest ISIS snuff movie,  a YouTube video of a cat riding a Great Dane.  Whatever the case, the same musical sound strikes, as if to say, "Ta da!  You have successfully processed another hit of Scaz.  Here's another!"
     A week or so ago I saw the last minutes of NBC News with Brian Williams.  He ended his show just like Inside Edition does; with a cute video probably snatched from YouTube.  The difference between Inside Edition and the rest of American news media (most of it Scaz) could be a matter of twenty-two minutes five days per week versus eighteen hours a day, with the people using the bigger number unable to figure out what to do with it.  When a Balloon Boy comes along, that's great for them.  Speculation in a vacuum of knowledge is easy.  Exploring why the world is so fucked up is difficult.

                                                                            Vic Neptune