REALITY. TV.

But several years ago, the 34-year-old mother of three stopped watching the morning shows. After getting TiVo, she had no patience to sit through multiple commercial breaks during a live newscast. On top of that, the segments began to seem more and more frivolous.

“Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist’s office,” said Lauck, who writes for websites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. “They don’t have anything new or particularly relevant to my life. It seems like a lot of fluff. I feel like I can get information faster and cleaner on the Internet.”

Lauck’s not alone in souring on network news programs. In particular, this season has seen a significant erosion of the morning shows’ demographic sweet spot: 25- to 54-year-old women.

Those shows’ producers may be the first ever to go broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Also, the tv news folks have been going beyond their usual negativity and sensationalism by playing up the bad news even more to make Bush look bad, but judging from this story by doing that they’re also chasing away their audience, which now finds their programs too depressing. Oops.