Pencils!!! 2 for 5
Watching the news is like getting the body count for the day. I know it's been beaten to death, but the news never seems to report anything good and if they do it is surrounded by the various death scenes of bigger stories. I wonder why it is I need to know that four men were killed in a head on collision yesterday on some street in Dallas. Of course it is sad and tragic, I wouldn't even begin to insinuate that it isn't, but do I really need to know about it? Am I more informed or better citizen for having this information?
The news media was coolly, sometimes hotly chastised for its coverage during the Sniper rampage. Showing the blood splattered mini van, the closed off scenes and police tape, very often reporters asking outrageously stupid and/or obvious questions, not to mention releasing unauthorized evidence. The media seemed unwilling to let this story go for very long, like so many other situations they've covered, they drained the life from every tidbit, scrap and film clip that they could. The expected troop of experts were shuffled through and gave us no end of boring drivel, from ballistics information to psychological analysis that most of us could figure out for ourselves.
So what was the purpose of it all? Information is power, but to me this kind of information and the people providing it seems to be providing a distraction on several fronts. Is the news media more of a disservice or a service?
I wonder how it all began, because one could say that the news stations are simply showing us what we want to see or you could say they started showing it to us we just got addicted to it...like visual cigarettes?