Media Blackout, or Death of a News Junkie
Back during the first Gulf War (or, as Jim Henley would prefer, when the ongoing Gulf War started), I was a sophomore in college. As I didn't have a lot else to do, I spent much of the war sitting around the rec room in our dorm, playing pool and watching CNN. I turned into a bit of a news junkie for a while after that, and used to watch Headline News regularly. There was a point in grad school when I probably could've named all the anchors, and the order in which they appeared.
By the time the September 11th attacks happened, I had mostly gotten over that (largely due to CNN's ongoing efforts to make Headline News suck). I relapsed somewhat after the attacks, and watched several hours of news on the day of the attacks. I quickly went back to getting news from text sources, mostly on the web.
In the current situation, I managed something less than half an hour the other day. The devastation in New Orleans is horrific, but the coverage is sickening-- a twisted combination of grief-pimping and mugging for the cameras.
On reflection, this is inevitable. The list of events for which minute-by-minute coverage is really necessary is a pretty short one. The situation in Louisiana is going to unfold over days and weeks, not hours and minutes, so there's just not enough information flow to justify continuous live coverage. As a result, you get the same snippets of video over and over, and the pathetic spectacle of news anchors trying to out-do one another in their expressions of shock and dismay, just to fill time.
My dissatisfaction with this process has now spread to include the "blogosphere" (more or less right on schedule, given that I first discovered it around 2000). Repetition does not add information, and partisan sniping and paranoid ranting are not useful commentary. Even sites that I generally like are pissing me off, and some have become well-nigh unreadable.
There's nothing I can do to force other people to have the common decency to refrain from explaining how this catastrophe perfectly illustrates the correctness of all their political opinions, at least until they finish fishing bodies out of the water. I can, however, reduce their reading audience by one.
I've got classes starting next Wednesday, and research work to do, and I really can't afford to be as cranky as blog-reading is making me. And given my demonstrated inability to reliably filter out things that are going to piss me off from things that are interesting or amusing, that means it's time for another media blackout. I'll continue to monitor email and comments here (to remove spam, if nothing else), but other than that, I don't plan to even fire up a browser until the 16th (to cover the sure-to-be-irksome 9/11 anniversary as well).
Why bother to post this? Well, obviously, because I'm such an arrogant jackass that I assume you all care deeply about my web-surfing habits. But also so that if I end up not re-starting for a longer period than planned, there's some explanation of why I stopped on the page, rather than just a rant about Windows.
Posted at 9:20 AM | link | follow-ups |