The 10 pm news after American Idol.

Back in the early 2000s, I remember exactly what I was doing almost every Tuesday and Wednesday night of my little preteen life. I was watching American Idol, just like every other God forsaken soul in the country.

Back then, it aired Tuesdays at 8 pm for the performance episode, and Wednesdays at 9 pm for the results show. Both nights ended at 10 pm, and because Fox has never had a 10 pm hour of programming, as soon as Idol was done, the local news began.

And I mean that literally: the very moment the show was over, that local news jingle BOMBARDED our family room with such force that the picture frames on the wall would often shake, crash to the floor, and shatter. So, even if my sister and I weren’t actually staying up to watch, we got a pretty good idea of what the nightly headlines were from the deafening promotional billboard.

I watched a lot of American Idol then and consequently, ended up sticking around for a lot of the top news stories at the beginning of the hour. And now, all these years later, I clearly remember them, for one reason.

Approximately 75 percent of the time, the leading story was exactly the same every Tuesday and Wednesday night. Can you guess what it was?

Keep in mind, this was in 2002, 2003, and 2004. What was the country up to back then? What may have made the news?

If you guessed anything relating to terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the 2004 presidential election. . . you’re wrong!

According to my local news station, after every airing of American Idol, the top, most important, most urgent, above-the-fold, leading story of the night was always THE RESULTS OF THE EPISODE OF AMERICAN IDOL WE JUST FINISHED WATCHING!

Rather than tell us anything about the world, or war, or politics, or business, or even, maybe, other pop culture. . . WSVN’s 7 News graced us with the privilege of discovering who got voted off, who performed what songs and how well, and other twists and turns that everyone LITERALLY JUST SAW HAPPEN MINUTES EARLIER ON THE SHOW.

And I understand the need for lead-ins, hooks to keep people tuned in to the news rather than immediately shutting off the TV and going to bed. But for the lead story every Tuesday and Wednesday night for an entire season of Idol, year after year?! This wasn’t exactly NBC’s Must See TV. This wasn’t even some kind of wrap-up show like you see now where people sit around and recap the episode as a vehicle for more entertainment.

It was. . . the local news. The same local news in Miami that ran every single night at 10 pm and continues to run to this day. And though I’ve seen the way news programs gradually degrade into pure fluff as time goes on, this was the early 2000s! It was a time when most people still actually needed a dedicated nightly news source! During the turbulent Bush years! And it was at 10 pm, beating the other Big Three networks to the punch by a whole hour!

How could channel 7’s journalists (while I could put journalists in quotes here, I won't; I call myself a journalist even though I do much less with news than they do) rationalize this? (Or, maybe they didn’t try to rationalize it and were looking for nothing more than the big advertising bucks.) Just, WHY? We just watched the show! This was the grand plan, draw in more eyeballs this way than with hard news? They’ve had the same advertisers week after week, year after year, regardless of what the news cycle has looked like. BELIEVE ME — I’ve watched.

It’s like, damn it! There were some good kids out there watching TV, staying up and waiting to hear the local news tell them something important about the world! Little Miami kids that may have been inspired to, I don’t know, become reporters! I could’ve been one of them! Look at what I write instead! This nonsense! ✍︎