OK, so it’s Easter Sunday morning, and I’m flipping through the dial desperately searching for something interesting to watch that doesn’t involve creepy old papabiles gesticulating their hands over golden artifacts while chanting something in mumbo-jumbonese. That’s when I tune to the KUSI Morning Show just in time to see journalist Doug Curlee reporting on Easter service at the Cabrillo Monument.

“The message was a simple one,” Curlee said about the Pastor’s sermon. “God’s love is always there waiting for us. We don’t even have to work that hard for it. Just think about that fact.”

Uh oh. Did he really just call God’s love a fact? I had to rewind my DVR to double-check, and, sure as shit don’t shop at Tiffany’s, there was Doug Curlee, a 40-year news veteran confirming the actual, factual existence of Thy Lord, Thy God and also, as matter of actual fact, confirming that Thy Lord, Thy God loves everybody.

How anyone could ever presume to know what is inside God’s mind is, to me, one of the higher mysteries of humanity. But to report this hocus pocus as fact, on a television news program, in the 21st freaking century, a good 30 years after Sidney Lumet gave us Network, and hundreds of years after, you know, reason was invented—well, holy crap, I never realized how pathetic the KUSI news division actually is.

I was working on my column with the TV on when I heard the reports about the bridge in Minneapolis collapsing. It sounded pretty bad, so I stopped what I was doing, started watching, and was quickly disgusted.

What I found bothersome, aside from the obnoxious media feeding frenzy, was something that was stated in the early hours of the reportage. What they kept saying—all the anchors on all the stations, incessantly, repeatedly, until they were absolutely certain that they had gotten the message across—was that terrorism was probably not the cause of the collapse.