On my way back from the store this afternoon, I heard a bit of news regarding fall TV programming as it would be during a screen writers’ guild and actors’ union strike. There will be more hours of reality TV and reruns of series, of course. The news host delivering the bad news then softened her story observing that the news of the day would still be delivered fresh from the field. I assumed that she meant coverage of mass shootings, House and Senate shenanigans, the war in Ukraine, riots both foreign and domestic, and natural disasters – we still have another couple of months of hurricane season, you know.
This got me to thinking. Field reporters, journalists, and film documentarians could walk out in solidarity with their fiction-focused content creating colleagues. Then maybe FOX, OAN (an abbreviation for the ONAN network), and maybe CNN could scare up some AI news. Chatbot-generated news would indeed fit the Trumpian trope of Fake News.