Nightline

One of my favorite news shows is Nightline (there are only 3 – Nightline, 60 Minutes, and Frontline). Not because the stories themselves are done well, or the reporters any good -they’re not, not since Ted Koppel and his gang left, but because the story topics are a very healthy mix of entertaining, atypical, and highly important subjects that will at least get you thinking if not outraged.

Unfortunately ABC News which is still the best mainstream American TV news organization has a completely annoying, self-congratulatory web presence. It just sucks. And it is really hard to find the good stuff on YouTube.

So I’ll do my best to put what I think are some good pieces up with comments and then update the video links as they improve.

Plastic in the Pacific
-this story appeared on March 26th, but Nightline doesn’t feel it is important enough to post the actual 4 minute story, in it’s place they have one of their dumbest producer/reporters give us a tour of her office and tell us about all the great pieces they are doing (including this one). Fuck you, ABC. Why is the news increasingly become advertisements for the news?

Here’s the print version for now, I’ll pull a YouTube clip from another source soon
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4528488&page=1

Cryogenesis
-This is one of my favorites. It ran on March 31st. It is supposed to run tonight on a Barbara Walters special, so I can understand why it is not available. It is about Alcor(?) which charges $75,000 to store you in liquid-nitrogen for 100 years or until they develop a cure for whatever killed you. Then they bring you back to life. They already have 100 frozen bodies (and some people who have apparently chosen the discount “brain” option), some family pets, and Ted Williams.

$75,000. I wonder how long that would rent a U-Haul storage space for? My guess is not 100 years. With inflation and all factored in. But here ABC has a nice 30-something couple sitting down in their kitchen holding hands and talking about how they’ve also bought spaces for their 3 kids. Are people this stupid?

But the best part is that this particular piece ranat the end of an episode that included a story about the collapsing real-estate market. Featuring a nice 30-something Florida couple with 2 kids sitting at their kitchen table, holding hands and whining about how they can’t afford the mortgages on the two condos they bought in 2004 and how they can’t sell them. Did they buy them to live in them. No. They bought them as an investment for the future of their kids, of course. Because “back then” everybody was talking about buying and flipping and it was a great thing to do. But they want everybody to know that they weren’t greedy, they were doing it for their kids. Oh… and they also mentioned how they did careful research on the industryand the market … so that makes it not their fault, I guess.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4561816&affil=wcvb