Dramas best news on issues.

• Author: Saltzman, Joe
• Position: WORDS IMAGES

IT WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY, but if you want to understand some of the key issues facing the country today, do not waste your time watching nonfiction television. TV news shows, documentaries, newsmagazine programs, and morning talk fests are too busy going on and on about crime, celebrities, lifestyles, restaurants, movies, weather, sports, music, and why everyone hates the news media. For real insight into some of the key issues facing society, you are better off watching such television dramas as "Boston Legal," the "Law & Order" franchise, "Grey's Anatomy," "ER," and even sci-fi programs like "Invasion."

David Kelly's "Boston Legal," for example, has taken on such topics as abortion, euthanasia, illegal government eavesdropping, health care insurance, despoiling the environment, slumlords, the Sudanese holocaust, creationism and Darwin in the public schools, corrupt practices of the pharmaceutical industry, censorship of students, sexual and religious harassment in the workplace, lies told by Army recruitment officers to get teenagers to enlist, and the growing lack of privacy.

You probably can get an even better handle on how terrorism works by watching "24" than from nonfiction television. TV journalists and their news managers seem to have forgotten about the health care crisis, apparently considering it old news. However, medical and law dramas give an in-depth view of what is going on when it comes to health care for the working poor. While TV news scares the public regularly with news bulletins screaming about a new health threat (Avian flu), natural disasters (wildfires and hurricanes), or terrorism (an orange or red alert), dramatic programs take on fundamental issues affecting our lives with better research, exposition, and sharp dialogue.

It seems the only writers listening to what is ailing the U.S. and the rest of the world are those creating TV's successful dramatic shows. TV journalists seem to be too busy trailing Brad and Jen and Angelina and Lindsay and Brittney or watching the police chase some anonymous drunk to worry about the stories that truly affect our present and future lives. The news shows do not even serve as an adequate headline service anymore. The nightly newsmagazines only seem interested in offering in-depth coverage of an obscure trial or murder mystery--or they show an overwhelming concern that everyone in America is becoming either too fat or too thin.

The news media--first print, then...