The above panels are from one of my favour cartoons, Non Sequitur.It does touch on a theme that resonates with me - how much news do we need to know? There is a fine line between knowing enough about what is going on in the world, being informed, and hearing far too much about the woes in individual's peoples lives - road accidents, untimely deaths, robberies, mayhem, disasters and calamities.
Every so often I have a 'break' from the news. Perhaps that is an unconscious driver behind our travels this year. We will miss most of the US election and a lot of the nationalistic hoo-ha that surrounds the Olympics. (I don't know what your country is like but the media here seems to think that the entire collective self-worth of the nation is inseparably bound to our medal count.). I don't mind missing either of these things.
And more fun than prison, too.
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Yeah..I can live without news too. Whenever I read newspapers, my focus is more on the human stories..not the elections, crime or sports. Sometimes it's good not to know much. I think my other half will die without news!
ReplyDeleteI won't read the kidnappings, the murders - all of the "outrage" that people get all worked up over. I'm convinced that it isn't any worse than it's ever been, but when I was young we read the news for 100 miles around... now we have it all, raising everyone's blood pressure and making them think that the entire world is filled with awful, dangerous people. I had friends in Ca that were seriously upset over the DC snipers some years back. It frightened them even though they were thousands of miles off.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest - I read it like an addict then swear off for a few weeks to get sane again.
I'm not a news junkie although I buy a paper most days. I just like reading! I don't watch TV news or listen to it on the radio - that's too non-selective. Like Hliza I just pick out the bits that interest me and that excludes politic, sport, wars, and anything to do with'celebrities'.
ReplyDeleteI think I was an ostrich in a previous life.
i don't watch tv news too, newspaper? occasionally and also read selected sections... the funnies, happy news. when are you arriving kuala lumpur? we're having our general election maybe somewhere in march!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Hayden. We hear about murders in the far corners of the globe at the same time as the local people hear of them. It's disaster overload and being internet addicted just makes it worse.
ReplyDeleteUS media also is nuts about the Olympic medal count. It all reminds me of a Monty Python skit about "News for Parrots" in which various disasters were reported in terms of the number of parrots involved. We are all becoming parrots - or sheep or something.
So, who DOES watch the news?! We don't watch the local news in our house and rarely watch the national news.
ReplyDeleteActually, most of our news comes from "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart - it's a "fake" news show on the Comedy Channel here in the US. (But we found it on CNN in Belgium when we were there 3 years ago - Ha!)
ha ha, can't blame him!
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