If McPaper wasn’t enough of a disgrace to the world of journalism, then McTV certainly is enough to push all media credibility over the brink.

Catering to America’s get-it-to-me-as-fast-as-you-can attitude, some bright spark came up with the idea to push fast-food style journalism. It started with USA Today the newspaper, and most recently, the trend has moved on to (drum roll, please…) USA Today: The Television Show.

Just like its predecessor, USA Today: The Television Show tempts viewers’ appetites with a high-visual, fast-news menu. But in reality all the audience is getting is an unbalanced news diet greatly lacking in substance.

But that’s OK, Executive Producer Steve Freidman says he isn’t worried much about the show’s lack of commitment to informing the public with the vital issues they need to know.

He isn’t concerned about maintaining standards set by past journalism traditions either. He gladly leaves all that to the networks.

What Freidman is most interested in does involve the multitudinous American population though. As a matter of fact, his concerns stem from the opinions of the public. Does the name “A.C. Neilsen” ring a bell?

You guessed it! Achievement is measured by shares and ratings. Success to Freidman and his staff depends not on how well they can educate and inform the public, but on how well viewers are entertained.

Viewers will be barraged by factoids—tidbits of information—and “snapshot” statistics intended to provide them with ample supplies of water-cooler talk for the office. As a matter of fact, Jim Ackerman, the producer of the Life section, said in TV Guide he feels his job has been done after he’s given people “good fodder for cocktail conversation.”

The half-hour magazine show, broadcast on some 155 stations across the country, borrows the program’s format from its namesake newspaper. The show offers four sections—USA, Money, Sports and Life—with four bubbly section anchors, lots of colorful graphics, lots of short “stories,” lots of even shorter blurbs all presented in a happy-face style of journalism which Freidman calls “the journalism of hope.”

This so called “journalism of hope” literally stems from the idea that no-news is good news.

Nightly newswatchers turning on their televisions to catch the latest happenings in the world through hard-hitting investigative journalism instead will be treated with human-interest angle news. Freidman says this up-beat approach to daily news will focus on “problem solvers rather than problem causers.”

So, take a news event, any news event. Hmmm…how about the recent natural disaster, Hurricane Gilbert. Don’t expect all that depressing comprehensive coverage of those left injured or even homeless by the hurricane and how they are coping and putting together their lives after this tragedy. We want happy-face journalism.

USA Today: The Television Show will go out and interview an entrepreneur who, unaffected by the floods, has turned an unfortunate incident into a moneymaking scheme by selling his hand-crafted boats to people who want to get back to their flooded-out homes. Everyone is happy in the end, right? The people can get back to their houses, and now the man can use all the money he earns to send his children to college.

So, what USA Today: The Television Show actually turns out to be is the daily news—minus the news—in a format targeted at viewers with the attention span of Saturday morning cartoon watchers. Pictures and words all whizzing by at a mile-a-minute pace and leaving the viewer’s mind reeling in confusion, questioning what the heck happened and thanking a God above for a commercial break or better yet … the end.