Dear Good Morning America,

Good Morning America is my primary news source. It embarrasses me a little to type that. The intellectual snob in my head wants me to explain myself. I sit down most days with a bunch of laundry to fold, or the makings of a menu and shopping list for the week, or some paperwork to dig through, and I watch Good Morning America, zipping through the commercials and interviews with minor celebrities from Dancing With the Stars so I can see the headlines, weather, and anything else of interest. I don't really have time to read the daily newspaper anymore, and our local news drives me over the edge with their 6 minutes of headlines and 24 minutes of commercials, sports, and you tube video highlights. We don't have real cable, and I cannot even BEGIN to handle Kathy Lee Gifford, so it's just been me and you and my laundry folding, GMA.

But I don't know how much longer I can hang on. I knew this day would come. First, there's just been issues of general irritation...like the constant barrage of teeny bopper singers that grace your stages. How many Disney tween idols do you really need to put on a news show for adults anyway? And honestly, if I see one more "survive the recession" segment in which you interview a "struggling" family that is spending $12 a day on lattes and $50 a month to buy the latest dvd's for their kids...Oh the humanity! Being reduced to home-brewed coffee and Netflix!!!

But there's actual offensive stuff from time to time too...stuff that not only do I not want my kids to see, but that I really don't want to see myself. It wasn't too very long ago that you ran your story about America's first transexual mayor, complete with an on camera interview, that sent me running for the remote before one of my kids walked in the room. And just this week there's been the constant playing, playing, and replaying of very graphic footage of shootings in Iran. But this morning was really over the top. First of all, let's pretend that I even really *want* to know all about the South Carolina governor's affair in Argentina. Let's pretend that discussing such things in such minute detail is not just crass and low-class, not even just for the sake of his wife and boys. The actual quotes from his letters are really unnecessary. I don't need to hear, really, how he loves her tan lines and the curve of her hips, or how he "cries out" for her body and the touch of her lips. This kind of detail is really just not necessary for a morning news show. Am I the only one with the sense to blush when hearing such a private and intimate thing being read so bluntly reported, rattled into a microphone like they are reporting so many Dow Jones points? Am I the only one to feel like this kind of thing smacks of a Jerry Springer show?