Walter Cronkite (it’s okay, kids– he may have been before your time) has an earful to say about today’s broadcast network news, lamenting "your health and mine and your backyard and mine and all that kind of thing" at the expense of more substantive reports.

Golly.

Fact is, I don’t watch much network news anymore. I prefer my magazine items in magazines, or even 60 Minutes, not in the one half-hour a day where we used to get to see what’s going on in the world. So I don’t watch. (Of course, I may be working late, too.)

If you read our lament about local news, you know we think everyone is trying to be someone else. The newspapers are aping People magazine, local news shows are aping "Geraldo" and "Hard Copy" and "Martha Stewart" and the real news is left in part to talk radio, the web, and what few column inches the newspapers don’t devote to features and fluff.

Local news is getting very bad. For one thing, they are no longer making news judgments. They are making ratings judgments. "News You can Use" leads as breaking news, and news that is stale is considered breaking if a reporter does a live standup at the scene hours after an event has happened. A Green Bay Packer trade outweighs almost anything international, and Natalee Holloway outweighs everything– except the weather.

There is room for an alternative. Local blogs help, but they are more opinion than newsbreakers. Still, in Milwaukee, give Bruce Murphy a read, or try wispolitics.com as a launching point. You’ll be able to explore much longer than just the few minutes of "hard news" the TV stations are giving us.