Adrift Among the Ghosts

Chalker, Jack L. "Adrift Among the Ghosts." In 1989 Annual World's Best SF, q.v. under Anthologies.

The protagonist-narrator is an alien from a high-tech culture supervising recording of Terran TV signals, as punishment (to oversimplify complex legalities) for a multiple murder. The punishment fits the crime since the court has found "that exposure to these alien signals has somehow conflicted with your primary intellectual imperatives" (265); the narrator is quite mad by the end of the story, apparently crazed by watching and rewatching the death of our civilization in nuclear holocaust.