I can’t help being something of a news junkie, and yet the 24 hr news channels are really annoying. They’ve got 24 hours to fill up; they do it, in part, with creative repetition in which the same story is mined for increasingly irrelevant bits of information to the point of meaninglessness. Having run out of current news they think will sell well, they turn to speculative news. They speculate, in appropriately alarming tones of voice, about what the news might be tomorrow or next week. The more frightening the better. In voices as shrill as Billy Mays pitching OxyClean, they seek to raise our collective anxiety high enough to tune in tomorrow to find out if their dire prophecies have come true. I guess they all went to the Chicken Little School of Broadcasting. Maybe a good economic recovery plan would be to shut them down for a month or two in order to restore a sense of calm reason to the American psyche. And that’s my humble opinion on that.
I don\’t think that what you described is by any means restricted to 24-hour news stations. The continuous coverage by a local network station in southeast Texas during and after Hurricane Ike allowed a lot of important, relevant information to be spread quickly to those who needed to know about it. However, after a week had passed, it had gotten really old…a sort of hyper-saturation of the topic. Of course, this case involved an actual event, but there was still a lot of \”It may…\” \”It could be that…\” and the ever-popular \”If…\”, clearly evidence of too much time to fill and too little specific information to offer. I wouldn\’t want to be a news reporter!
this reminds me of your earlier \”curmudgeon\” post…it mainly confirms for me our decision to not have t.v. that receives any news stations (or other stations for that matter)…you may not watch movies, but i don\’t watch the news reruns/recaps/if only\’s…maybe between the two of us, we can become an \”informed\” well-rounded unit 🙂
I like the button marked \”power\” – it gives me the power to cease the \”what if\’s\” and \”maybe\’s\” when I\’ve had enough:)