This film and Kate Plays Christine

“We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad — worse than bad. They’re crazy.”

That speech from Network has been praised for 40 years by cinephiles as one of the most prophetic films providing insight of how television would develop. But for as much as it was a prediction of today’s state of TV news and reality shows through the mad prophet Howard Beale, this industry was already spiraling out of control — so much so that a 29-year-old reporter killed herself live on air in 1974. http://tinyurl.com/zjk54mf