Brad Marley

Some of my friends don't trust the media. Until last week, I didn't understand why.

I grew up in a household where the newspaper hit our front porch every morning and I devoured it — along with my oatmeal — every day before school. News gathering was as common a daily task to me as food gathering was for Cro-Magnon man.

How could anybody go about their daily lives ignoring the news?

Then, one morning last week, I turned on my computer and saw the catastrophic news: a shortage of Eggo waffles.

While I tried to imagine a future where breakfast tables sat waffle-less, I was blindsided by another piece of news that will surely dampen the holiday spirit: canned pumpkin pie filling is in short supply.

I didn't have to scrounge to find the news, either.  It was front and center on Yahoo - a site that averages four million visits per day.

Suddenly, I had an inkling as to why my friends are so anti-news: most of it is non-news.

As the hard copy newspaper goes the way of the woolly mammoth, we are forced to sift through the noise on the Web to find the hard news.

If it's any indication of where our priorities lie, historians might look back on 2009 as the year the One Piece of Pumpkin Pie Rule was signed into law, and real news became extinct.

Wouldn't it make things a lot easier on the media if, like Sunday morning golfers, they got mulligans when they erred?

If that do-over was in place, here's how the headline would have read for today's breaking news event:

Empty hot-air balloon floats harmlessly over Denver skyline; absolutely no one harmed

At the very least, it would make the news more accurate.

The national media demonstrated again today why they struggle to earn our trust when they led us to believe a six-year-old boy was stuck helplessly in his father's homemade weather chaser, headed for certain injury, until the balloon crashed and we discovered the basket was empty.

Oops. 

Did anybody think to search the house before, you know, breaking into daytime soap operas across the country? Or is it now sufficient to accept the word of parents who once traded each other in for a different model?

This is the problem with 24/7 news. They tend to make things news that never should have been made news in the first place because they have the time, so we become desensitized to the important stuff.

Nowadays it takes a story of epic proportions to rattle us out of our talking head-induced daze. We would rather watch television shows about women with pickle cravings who — surprise! — didn't know they were pregnant, or arguing parents with eight kids, because they are more believable than Wolf Blitzer.

I suppose it's like eating ice cream every single day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Eventually you'll get sick of it.