"News"

Reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death several years ago changed my perspective on "news" forever. Postman posits we have a distorted view of the world because of the 24-hour news cycle. When we hear news reports from far-off lands, with the urgency of "breaking news", it tends to jar us and cause us to believe this news affects us in some way. In reality, our daily lives are rarely directly affected by items in the news headlines. Think about this the next time you watch a 30-minute news broadcast. How much of what you hear being reported will directly influence you and your local community?

Lately, though, I'm even more disillusioned and disgusted with the news business. I'm not going to bother to get into politics here. I'm talking about the perspectives of the news reporting agencies and about what qualifies as news and what doesn't. My main gripe concerns the recent disastrous flooding in Nashville. The flooding occurred the day we left for Florida, May 1, and the next several days. We flew from Indianapolis to Memphis on Saturday, May 1. I won't bore you with details, but we wound up stranded at the Memphis airport for six hours in the midst of torrential rains and local flooding. The next day, we started seeing indications of the extent of flooding problems in Memphis, and worse, in Nashville.

Did we see these indications on the news? MSNBC? Fox? ABC/NBC/CBS? No. Did we read about the flooding in USA Today or the New York Times? No. We read about the flooding on Nashville-based blogs and on Facebook. We saw pictures of the flooded Opryland Hotel and Opry Mills. We heard reports of dozens of deaths from the flooding. We still didn't read/see/hear anything about the flooding in the national news. This article explains why.

On Friday, May 7, we were in New York City for Luke's college graduation. I left our hotel mid-afternoon to walk the half-block to Luke's apartment and overheard the doorman tell another guest to avoid Times Square because there had been another bomb threat there. In minutes, this bomb threat was reported on all the major cable news networks. Turns out, the threat was false. Someone reported an abandoned ice cooler and when police opened the cooler they found nothing but ice and water. While I completely understand New Yorkers being on edge following the Times Square attempted bombing incident, it seems a bit ridiculous that a false bomb threat garnered more attention on the cable news networks than the very real, very deadly, very costly flooding in Nashville.

I've all but quit watching the "news". What I see when I do watch it is whatever the producers in New York think I should think is relevant, important, or news-worthy. I'm tired of the bi-coastal perspective which thinks only events which happen on the east or west coasts is important. I'm tired of the media ignoring or distorting what happens in the "flyover" states. I'm tired of hearing the same stories covered ad nauseum. I don't care about Tiger Woods. I don't need to hear one more account of decades-old abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. I am certainly sorry for the family of the college rugby player killed by her estranged boyfriend, but I don't want to know about the details. I don't need to see the oil slick in the gulf or the pipe spewing thousands of gallons of oil more than once to realize there's a big ecological problem there. And I still haven't mentioned politics...

I'm only aware of all these events because, unlike me, Terry still watches the news. He usually turns it on in the mornings and in the evenings. Honestly, if it were up to me, the TV would only be turned on for baseball and perhaps an occasional special show. I'm not complaining, just explaining how I know what's happening if I'm boycotting the news. Heh heh.