We're Doing "News" Wrong

Maybe it's because I'm a *card-carrying member of the TV-addled generation who can remember a time when "the news" was actually the news, but I am sick of all the crap, know what I'm sayin'? People are tripping. It's too much.

* It's just an old defunct video store membership card.  



In our super low budge deadest-end of Connecticut's ramshackle urban sprawl, we got the daily local, The Waterbury Republican, and my father bought the New York Daily News on Sundays. The paper was pink for awhile in the 80s for some reason, and there was often an athlete or TV star on the front page, plus it had an fat center section with crosswords and Find-Its and advice columns and contests, plus sometimes you'd find a large foldout poster—maybe a New York Yankee. We kids caught bits of info, such as "ketchup is a vegetable" and "trees cause pollution." Because Reagan.

Then there was the radio and TV talking heads who read news out loud to you while you babysat your brother, who sat on the floor in his superhero Underoos and practiced spelling out BOOBLESS on your brand new digital calculator.

The only TV in the house was in the den if you were a reg'luh Amerikun, in the parlour ("pah-ler") if you were Sicilian. The set was the size of a VW bug, and it didn't have to match the furniture because it was furniture. Like all quality technology (including the car) parts of the TV simulated some sort of wood. You twirled that UHF dial when nobody was looking, just to see what happened. When you got a new TV, it just got placed on top of the old TV. Thankfully that meant putting away into the sticky-back photo album all those photos of you and your brother in short-shorts, tall socks and eyeglasses the size of car windshields. 

Before cable television and the Internet ushered forth the 24-hour news cycle, the news was actually news. The news spread when you went to the movies with your friends. That's when you told each other what happened that day, what you read, what you saw, what happened at home, last weekend at camp, last month at your grandfather's funeral, last night on the 25th Anniversary of Motown, did you see that? You didn't!? It was like totally awesome! If only there was a way that you could see it, but it was already on TV, see, so you missed it...but let me tell you all about it...remind me.

Communication Nation

Back in the days when you couldn't wordlessly post a link (which is like lobbing a thought-grenade back over your shoulder as you run by) it was necessary to convey expression every time you communicated with people, and because that contact was either via telephone or in person, people heard your voice and/or saw your face. Expression. As technology has moved more and more of our personal interactions online, we can only do our best at expression in text form. Hence the emoticon, and shortcuts that stand in for our most expressive moments. LOL.

Local calls free, long distance rates better after 7pm on weeknights.

Remember time limits for the phone? Remember stretching the cord so you could talk to your friends as far from the family as possible, which sometimes involved a broom closet. In those days, an exchange with someone that wasn't in the room with you was not a perpetual entity; when you were at home with your family, all of your friends were at home with their families, too. You would call and communicate when you both had time and opportunity for the conversation, and during the communication you were each other's sole audience.

I specifically called Michelle when Dr. Noah Drake appeared on General Hospital for the first time, because she was babysitting her brother too, just like I was, and between making the bologna sandwiches for the little boys, and all their whining, they were always making us miss stuff. "You were my Rick Springfield friend," Michelle told me recently. When I saw Motown 25, I called Simone to make sure she was watching it, then we talked about it for like...twenty years, with a gap in the middle before we found each other...on Facebook. When we were kids, Simone was my Michael Jackson friend. Dude, she had the red jacket. 

Enter Facebook

Social networks, having taken the place of actually having to talk to your friends deliberately, are a vital organ in the gargantuan info-monster that never sleeps. While it's nice to be in touch with everyone that I miss seeing IRL, by the same token, I found out Michael Jackson died on Facebook. I think I would have preferred a phone call from one friend. It's TOO MANY FRIENDS all talking at once about Michael Jackson. It's too overwhelming. Could you imagine receiving 600 phone calls to tell you that Michael Jackson died?  IT'S TOO MUCH, I TELL YOU.

How to NEWS Better

• Watch your local TV news

• Read the local paper 

• Tune into BBC now and then for an unbiased take on how we're doing, they got no "USA! USA!" rubbish
  

• Look for community-oriented sources, such as women's news, and seek out black analysts, school-supported sources aimed at parents & families, and so forth...sign up to get info from outside your bubble, whatever your bubble may be

• Flip it over to CSPAN so you can see what these so-called representatives are doing when they think nobody is watching.