This morning (May 3), Good Morning America featured a lengthy interview with a mother who hid with her child in a bath tub during one of the Arkansas tornadoes. Okay, news of devastation wrought by nature is newsworthy. It's important to know the extent of havoc and what the governments, state and federal, might be doing to assist those who were made victims of it. It's an indication how he rest of us might be regarded in a same or similar circumstance.

But an interview with the mother who hid in a bathtub? And the inane questions that composed the interview. GMA even asked the youngster how she felt, "Were you frightened?"

C'mon . . . Look, I've concluded that if you're tuning in to such insidiously insipid programming, essentially what you're doing is tuning out. And things are being done to you and your kids and grandkids, really bad things, that just maybe deserve a little of your attention.

This one, from April 29, is admittedly a bit old, but I doubt many heard or read about it: former Defense Department chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, testified under oath how he was pressured by the administration to "hurry along cases at Guantanamo so the administration could claim before political elections that the system was working."

It's just as likely few learned from their choice of news sources how the administration has never had any interest in investigating whether those held in Guantanamo, or in any of their secret overseas detention centers (what a nice way to describe those black holes where no rules of conduct or justice apply), ever were the least tied to combat against Americans or terrorist plots against the United States.

Or, what about this morning, and the Bush administration's firing of Mary Gade, the EPA official who was battling Dow Chemical to clean up the dioxin mess in Midland, Michigan and in Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron that it was responsible for creating? Oh yeah, if you were a Michigan resident you might have heard or read about it. But let's say you lived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula or in any part of the other 49 states. How much news attention did that draw? Think it might be of at least passing interest to you, if the person who had been trying to get some chemical company to clean up the cancer-related disaster it left in your backyard and drinking water had been fired by the president, because the EPA (Environmental 'Protection' Agency!!!) official was pressuring the offender, trying to protect YOUR environment?

This past week, Pentagon officials once again reported DoD has no clue where tens, perhaps hundreds, of billions of taxpayer bucks may have disappeared. The department is "not auditable," and auditors have just "given up."

Nope. The national broadcast and cable media dissed you: you're just so hopelessly, incredibly stupid that you cannot possibly grasp the import of either these stories, or stories like them. According to the broadcast and cable corporations, your life is better served with interviews with the bathtub family, as opposed to anything with depth that might help you decide how you'll cast a vote for the occupant of the most important office in the world.

And you've got to wonder, who are really the dumb ones: Diane Sawyer, Charlie Gibson, Robin Roberts and crew for the really stupid, and highly irritating because it is just so stupid, chatter that pervades the programming - or those who mindlessly tune in? I say "mindlessly" because "mindful" and watching such programming is oxymoronic.

- Ed Tubbs