Not Missing the News
For most of my life, and certainly from about the time of graduate school onward, I have not had much time, patience for, or interest in broadcast television or radio news. I also never developed the habit of, nor set aside time for, reading a newspaper. Once upon a time I might have listened to "All Things Considered" but these days I begrudge the time and quickly get restless listening to news reporters talk, unless I happen to be driving, which I rarely am at that time of day anymore.
You wouldn't believe the number of people who felt sorry for me for being so out of touch (and probably un-American, to boot).
But I developed a theory: if something really important happened, something truly significant–like the Soviets had launched a nuclear attack (yes, there still was a Soviet Union in those days and they were still our dreaded nuclear cold-war enemies)–then someone would probably run down the hall shouting the news.
And you know what? That's pretty much turned out to be true. Especially for big events, like terrorists destroying the World-Trade Towers and killing thousands of people, folks did run down the halls shouting the news. It was unavoidable and I was in touch!
These days my window of contact with the outside world (which I wouldn't want to go so far as to label "reality") comes largely through the blogs I read. They're listed somewhere on this page. They serve as my news filter. Yes, there is undoubtedly some ideological filtering going on, but then I really don't need to follow a whole load of dumb-shit conservative crap for myself when there are other people to tell me about anything that stands out or seems unusually dangerous to secular democracy as we know and love it.
I'm sure that many well-meaning people would still consider me out of touch, but I do have a reputation as an absent-minded scientist to maintain and besides, I usually have heard about the "important" news stories well before my broadcast-news, newspaper-reading friends. "Have you heard..?", "Did you read…?" they ask. "Oh, I knew about that two, three days ago," I report. They typically exhibit amazed disbelief: after all, I don't read newspapers or listen to real news.
But–gosh!–there are times when I almost miss really important things. Why, I hadn't even heard that Obamas's plan for "socialized" health-care would require euthanasia of old people–according to certain wack-O Republicans. How could I have missed that!
Where does all the dreck come from? The easy theory is that the number of available channels and outlets for "news" have grown so much in recent decades that there simply isn't enough newsworthy news to fill the time and space on those channels, and they must be filled with something. That's not so hard to understand.
What is difficult to understand is why so many otherwise sensible people pay any attention to the dreck, let alone get really worked up over it as though it were actually important.
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on Saturday, 1 August 2009 at 00.18
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As I'm sure you know, I'm a reader, listener and viewer of the "news." As such, I well appreciate the truth in your next-to-last paragraph. I'm probably guilty of what's in your last paragraph, even to the extent of blogging that way at times. Yet, in my own defense, it's also true that pass on the chance to blog about, or be all that concerned with, many of the latest-buzz stories day to day.
For one thing, at some point three or four years ago, I resolved to generally avoid letting Limbaugh and his ilk pull my chain. I often try to blog more about issues and events. Ironically, that tends to make posts longer and often less likely to be read and commented on. Shorter, punchier and snark-filled posts about Limbaugh and his ilk or about Palin, Cheney or their ilk tend to draw more readers and trigger more comments.