local vs. foreign news
You have hit on a sore spot with me as well. I am always complaining that at 11:00 PM the local news is likely to lead off with a 5-minute story about a family with 6 small children who have been forced to leave their house because of a gas leak, but who are perfectly OK at a relative's house. This followed by 3 minutes (still a long time on local news) about the U. of MD basketball team's success in NC, or something similar. After 2 commercials, 15 minutes into the broadcast, they would get, for about 30 seconds, to something like a war breaking out with hundreds of casualties in some unfamiliar place, like Borneo, or Burkina Fasso; then maybe 15 seconds on an avalanche somewhere killing 150 people (pictures mandatory, or no story at all).

The fact is that all this is market-driven. The finance boys, acting on the info. received from their bean counters, have learned that the average American is primarily interested in what's going on in his immediate locale, and not interested at all, no matter the gravity of the news, in what goes on in places he knows nothing about. Hence the priorities established for local news reports. The worst thing about local news is that the anchors now try to depict themselves as your friends and neighbors and the station as a sort of elder brother who is making this nightly visit by dearly beloved family members possible. Ugh! [holding nose emoticon]

But that's not the worst possible thing about TV news reporting. I hope and pray that no U.S. president will ever again be assassinated, or otherwise die in office. I could not go through another 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week obsession with reporting on that and every possible ramification to the exclusion of virtually everything else, and going over and over the same stuff until you want to scream.