I break down the “news” into two basic groups. 1) Fact reporting “the dow went up this many points, the Cubs lost 4-3, Chicago had 6 murders this weekend, etc.”, and 2) the rest is opinion and/or commentary and usually is worthless.

Many of the things that are reported upon are extremely complex when you think about them. I once read an entire supreme court case including the supporting documents on both sides and it was a crushing load of facts and historical interpretation of the Constitution. Of course the papers and cables break it down into one liners and 30 second sound bytes.

A recent example – I would imagine that Michael Jackson’s estate is a tangled mess of crap that will take months (years?) to unravel, and I assume that state laws, federal laws, and laws of other countries (overseas assets or debts) will need to be looked at to get it done. Yet all we see in the paper or news flash is that so and so “filed” for this.

One problem is that as a whole most people simply don’t care about most outcomes and just swallow the provided commentary whole. In the defense of “people”, life is busy. I, for one, don’t care about MJ’s estate so will be following that with one liners provided by people who know less than nothing about settling an estate. One day I may go to some lawyer blog and read about it as for a guy like myself, that would be some interesting reading if it is made public (who gets the stuffed life sized Peter Pan?).

The other problem is that if you had a bunch of intelligent people reoprting and commenting on the news there would be a very small market for it – just sit in your local mall for 30 minutes and observe the people walking by and you will see what I mean.

Great line.