Jeremy Zawodny and Russell Beattie: "Shut up about the Shuttle already."
"Just turn off the TV today."
I would like to claim that my exasperation at WUTC at the time was more than simple media addiction. On the way to the library NPR was telling us about the astronauts, actually informing whereas television, I fully admit, wants to hypnotize you in whirling frenzy. As Russell writes, "'The Media Hype Machine' [is] too broad a stroke. It's the 24 hour news channels and the idiot local stations."
I'd like to say radio can inform in ways tv can't, but then I remember the vapid bumper chat I heard flanking the State of the Union address--it's not so much radio versus tv as information versus emotion. So while parents had CNN on in the background during the evening, I was off doing the computer thing (and composing this entry for a big chunk of the night).
I already have a low tolerance for television news, so I don't find it very useful in times of crisis. Yeah, I watched the first hours of 11 September, after hearing of it online and news web sites being so busy, but after that I mostly got news from talk radio. (Parents preferring to watch FoxNews didn't help.) What you put in your eyes and ears is important for your mental health.
And when it comes right down to it, 24 hour news coverage is excessive. (This is the other second thought about my annoyance with WUTC.) I would like the all-news channels would be better if they took the CNN Headline News approach of explicitly rebroadcasting a particular set of news throughout the day--well, CNN can get on with its shows and things, because it has Headline News to do that for it. The problem is CNN doesn't: it keeps harping the same topic all day even as Headline News covers things.
Comments
comment
I don’t remember if it really was the first “there’s only one news story, and we’ll show it all the time” or not, but OJ Simpson was the straw that broke my TV news watching back, and I haven’t really missed it since. If I find out through other sources that there’s a particular piece of video that I want to see, I’ll turn on the TV, but otherwise I just ignore it completely. That’s why I was so puzzled about Jeremy’s post at first, since I thought he was talking about weblog posts about how people honestly felt about it, not a thousand TV stations trying to find some way to keep talking long after they ran out of anything useful to say.