"Don't know"
I've been a news junkie almost as long as I
can remember.
From an early age I loved watching the evening
news, both local and national. Most of the towns we lived in had a
small weekly paper, and I loved to read it cover to cover. My maternal
grandfather, though he lived in one of those tiny towns with a little
weekly paper, also subscribed to one of the dailies from the state
capital. I loved reading it when we went to visit, especially if there
was a week's worth of back issues laying about.
Just as most of the places we didn't have
daily papers, most also had at most one radio station. You could
receive signals from stations further away only at night, when
regulations allowed the big city stations to turn up the power on their
antennaes. Even then, it was all AM, usually playing pop or country
music most of the day. But every hour, on the hour, there would be a
break for three-to-five minutes of news. Part would be syndicated news
from one of the big networks, plus a local story or two.
When I was 16 we moved to a town large enough
to have a daily newspaper, and close enough to a large city that there
was several radio stations on both the AM and FM dial. It wasn't long
before even all of that wasn't enough. The school library received a
couple of weekly newsmagazines and a couple of daily newspapers from
larger cities, and I read them all, devouring all the information I
could.
For many years National Public Radio fed my
addiction. I could listen to it most days while working (paying varying
levels of attention, depending on what tasks I was doing). I found
myself timing tasks at work based on the shows. If I hadn't finished a
particular series of tasks by the time Fresh Air came on at 2pm, say,
then I needed to notify the other people in the same project that I was
running over, for instance. Then the schedules changed, and tightening
budgets meant that fewer syndicated shows were being carried on the
local station because local call-in shows were much, much cheaper to
produce. I could still get a lot of news from the radio, and didn't
feel like I was losing much because internet news sources were getting
better all the time.
I would often be amazed at how little of what
was going on in the world was known by some of the people I hung out
with. I understood that not everyone was a news junkie, but when
certain stories seemed to be on every single outlet, and were even the
topics of jokes in sitcoms, I was still flabbergasted that some folks
knew nothing about it.
I couldn't understand how someone could exist
being that uninformed. I understood that some people find the news
depressing, especially if they are only casual consumers of news. Of
course they will only see or notice the most sensational stuff. But the
idea of not knowing what is happening was just as incomprehensible as
if someone had said they survived without oxygen.
Until my life changed recently, and I found
all my old routines disrupted. Now I only hear a little bit of the news
in the morning, and only read a couple of my old usual news sites about
once a week, if that. Suddenly I'm the one who didn't know there was an
earthquake until a few days later, or that a tropical storm went
through a place where people I know live until a week after.
I don't like it.
Or I should say, part of me doesn't like it. I
feel guilty when I realize I'm out of the loop on a major news story. I
am surprised and chagrined when I listen to the podcast of my favorite
humorous news quiz show, because now I don't know most of the answers
to the questions.
In other ways I'm okay with it. It's even
funnier listening to that humorous news quiz, for instance. The silly
and strange news items are funnier when they're a surprise. If my lack
of news was really bothering me, I would be taking steps to stay in the
loop, such as setting aside some of my other activities to make time to
read my favorite news sites, or buying a pocket radio (since there
isn't a radio attachment for my model of iPod) so I could listen to the
news in places where I currently can't.
But I haven't done those things, and aside
from the those occasional twinges of guilt and the moments of surprise,
I don't feel lost, confused, or unhappy. When I do turn to the news, I
think I'm paying a bit more attention that I have been lately, and
enjoying more the experience of learning (even if it is transient
information, it is still knowledge) smaller morsels of what's
happening. Maybe nibbling from time to time is better than frequent
grazing.
Don't get me wrong---I still subscribe to a
few news-related podcasts that I listen to from time to time on the
iPod, but most days the music is more appealing to me. Maybe that's a
good thing. Or maybe it's all just a phase.
I'll keep you posted.
--Joseph Campbell
.