hopelessly devoted to deconstructing popular culture and conventional wisdom, one blog at a time

Published Thursday, August 18, 2005 by seanlmccarthy | E-mail this post

THE PROBLEM WITH MORNING TV "NEWS," LOCAL EDITION: Full disclosure -- sometimes I appear on live TV newscasts to talk about pop culture. But that won't stop me from ranting about the fact that when programs allow their talkers to talk, they don't always make much sense.

This morning on FOX 25, they decided to bounce around opinions on this insightful AP story about how many musicians are resorting to "greatest hits" CDs before their time. Their biggest talker, VB, rambled on about his recent purchase of "the very best of Eric Burdon" and how he was angered to learn that the version of "House of the Rising Sun" was not the version he was looking for. Then the chopper pilot weighed in with his acquisition of Pat Benetar's greatest hits -- which, for reasons still unexplained, prompted VB to shout: "The '80s are over." Wait. Did he just go from praising Eric Burdon to panning the 1980s in the span of a minute? Yes. Why yes, he did. The bigger question: Why didn't anyone question that? Eggsactly.