TV News

I usually don’t watch TV news programs. But I am on travel right now, and I turn on the TV sometimes just to have some noise in the room with me. Last night was good...a soccer game was on ESPN 2, Egypt vs. Italy. Egypt was up 1-0. In the morning, though, there are no live sporting events. You get Sports Center, which repeats itself regularly. Tiger Woods got a double bogey. Tiger Woods got a birdie. Tiger Woods is 2 strokes off the lead. Tiger Woods is held up by a rain delay. Oh yeah, and there are other golfers in the tournament, too. Tiger is a great golfer, but the reporting was monotonous. Sports news gets boring to me in a hurry.

So I try a regular news channel instead. Yesterday, MSNBC was examining the question of whether Obama is overexposed in the media. They were questioning whether he appears too much on the TV, in reports on the radio, on the covers of magazines, and such. I am not making this up: a 24-hour news channel was complaining about overcoverage of a newsmaker. Obama is the President of the United States, of course he should be regularly in the news, especially US news outlets, and of course he is overexposed in the media, because the media bombards us with drivel 24/7. I had to turn off the TV.

This morning, I tried again, CNN this time. They were having what appeared to be an open forum on the question, “Is the word feminism obsolete?” They were randomly interviewing people across America, reading comments posted on their website, doing dramatic camera-angles sweeps and cuts around their reporters in the field, and playing dark, threatening music to set the mood of impending doom. This is the best they can come up with for news? I had to turn it off.

It’s good to remind myself why I don’t watch TV, especially the news. Instead I get 2 newspapers and listen to NPR in the car. It’s more than enough. I also read a few different magazines, not really for news for in-depth analysis of the issues. Harper’s is my favorite.