Everyday i put myself through the same torture, i know what’s going to happen but i still have to find out. It’s tragic really but this is the gift of globalisation, 24 hour wall to wall coverage of wars, terrorism, rapists, anti social behaviour, moral state of decay, teenage pregnancies and the fact that everything you eat or do is bad for you and will give you cancer. You can’t get away from the news, internet, radio, whole TV stations and newspapers dedicated to it.
What though is the worst type of news ,would it be the wars or trials of perpetrators of child abuse or perhaps the glorification and near deification of celebrities? For me it’s the latter. While i am sickened by all the terrible events from around the world, i live in vain hope that society as a whole can learn from them and that bad people will be bought to justice. For celebrities though it’s best that i differentiate celebrities, from ‘celebrities’, the first being someone in the spotlight fora particular talent and the latter winners of reality tv shows or ‘celebs’ for claiming to have slept with someone famous.
The former, i don’t really mind much about, most have a talent and whether they justify column inches because they buy a dog is an arguable case but at least they bought the dog with money earned off the back of talent, the other bunch though tend to have bought nothing to society but have managed to get into the public consciousness thus supposedly justifing column inches. Children being asked at school what they’d like to do upon leaving are saying celebrity or singer(for example) this leads to many tearful pleas on the X Factor from kids who can’t sing claiming that singing is there life and that without it they may have to get a really job like normal people and stick to singing karaoke like abnormal people.
Whilst not to labour the point the worst part of news on any media, is how it has become soundbite orientated because apparently we don’t have the same attention span and can’t sit still long enough to ingest full stories not like we used to in the good old days. The problem with this style is that stories are quickly forgotten because the relentless machine of news craves stories(or non stories as is increasingly becoming). How many people know the latest from Darfur for example? Yet we have stories on who wears what at the oscars or a tall man being tall to fill up our insatiable need for news.
For me though the worst bit of watching the news (on TV) is the bit at the end where they show a puppy or such like, hoping you’ll forget the horrors going on all around in society. I’d rather the last bit of the news was saved for good news like more people are being saved from cancer or that crime rates are down, something positive that will make me feel safe and that there is some hope for civilization.
