What Ever Happen to Reporting the news as news?

So I have been on boycott this past week from watching any news or sportscenter. Why or how did this start? Well last Saturday I was working out at the rec center early in the evening at my school. And these rec centers are the types that are decked out with all the latest and newest fitness equipment (cardio, weights, bikes you name it) plus tvs with satellite cable throughout the fitness room. After I got through huffing and puffing on the treadmill on the hills mode (hills ain’t no joke), I saw the breaking news on ESPN moving ticker. A-roid had admitted to using steroids from 2001-2003 when he was playing for the Texas Rangers. ( I will save the baseroids story for another day, since baseball is my favorite sport). And so looking at the ticker (I mean how else am I suppose to know college basketball scores?) it kept repeating nonstick on A-roid. Like that was all I could see. When they went to commercials on the basketball game I had been watching, their top story/breaking news was on him. It was like, gosh jolly so another one was dirty ok move on. But the sports ticker wouldn’t get off, so I got annoyed. Ok here comes Sunday morning. Now I am a self-admitted political junkie. You can ask my close friends what I whether be doing on a Friday night instead of hitting the club. So anyways, I first watch This Week on ABC, then if I can catch it, sometimes Meet the Press. With This Week, they had talked about the “stimulus” bill in the Senate, and in between that, George Stephanolous (I know, misspelled terribly) had interview Michael Steele, and some of the answers that Mr. Steele was providing left my head scratching and a bit less intelligent, but I digress. Next, I tuned the TV to CNN and after watching the news for not even 30 minutes, I was terribly disgusted with the stories being reported, or how terrible the stories seemed to be reported. Later on after that and before I started studying, I read some online newspaper (i.e. Houston Chronicle, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune) and the headlines, the stories and the bloggers responses to the stories just made my internal thermometer bubble even more. After this, I declared to myself, I am on strike from the news. It’s the same stories over and over and over and then you listen to the headlines, all negative all negative all the freaking time. And if you watch something repeatedly negative, you begin to become negative or more cynical than usual. And that is what happened to me. And the straw that broke the camel’s back: the breaking news about the whole Chris Brown and Rihanna situation (another blog for another day). So I turned the tv off, stepped away and shut down all news and political websites, and just started doing other stuff. And as the week went by, I realized, hey this is not so bad, not watching the news all the time. Plus with me not watching the news for one week, I am still informed than probably over 90% of Americans anyways.
But I digress, I realized for a very long time (since I was in middle school) that sensation only sells, and be damn the truth. I remember how I wanted to be a journalist for a minute because of my passion and devotion to writing and expressing one’s thoughts. I also thought that being a journalist was an excellent endeavor because of the research, the background information and verification of all sources before you ran with a story. But nowadays, newspapers seem to get their news from entertainment, politically leaning and biased sources and gossip newspapers. And it’s a shame because the artistry that went with journalism in the American medium seems to be all but dead in the 21st century. All news channels seem to be just the plain devil because of the continuous loop of reporting the same stories over and over, and more and more interjections of personal and political opinions instead of just sticking to the facts.
So what is a girl to do once her moratorium ceases to exist on Sunday? I don’t know but heaven help me. It’s getting hard to find any facts and details anymore in a story.