Good News, Bad News
There was a time when I enjoyed looking through a newspaper. Especially on Sundays, it used to be a pleasure to sort through the different sections, culling the classifieds, Parade, and, before I’d had enough economics to comprehend it, the business section, savoring the other sections one by one, perhaps reading back to front for a big finale with section A, hard news both national and international. I remember reading the comics section of the Akron Beacon Journal after dinner at my grandparents’ house, continually delighted by “Calvin & Hobbes” and baffled by the concept of “Prince Valiant” — was it SUPPOSED to not be funny? Now, though, after wading through the news online all day at work, as per my job description, I find myself informationally exhausted at home with no use for anything but the sports scores.
What might this mean for us internet-based connoisseurs of current affairs? My guess is that it means we pay much less conscious attention to the events of the day, instead taking in information through some sort of osmosis; browsing blogs and commentary, I don’t so much try to actively comprehend what I’m reading as much as I let the news-polluted waves wash over me, hoping to catch a few worthwhile tidbits before I’m coughed up onto shore at the end of the day. As I come home feeling kind of dazed and dirty, I warily eye the newspaper much as a seasick sailor might regard an uncooked steak.
I first noticed this change in reading/learning styles when some busy person who hadn’t had time to keep up with the news lately asked me what was going on in the world. I knew I had a decent grasp of politics and world events, but for some reason I was frustratingly unable to recall any of it. When prompted I realized I could fill in the relevant details about the big Supreme Court decision or terrorist threat or whatever might have been going on at the time, but only in the way I might if asked about what I’d eaten for dinner on the third Tuesday of last month; that is to say, I could supply the information but not very enthusiastically or clearly.
Personally, I blame two factors for this mental decay: ubiquity of content and lack of primary sources, both of which chronically plague blog readers. My job entails keeping track of links to our website, which reports on environmental news and related political issues, so I fill my RSS reader with sources like AlterNet, Salon, and Mother Jones. However, most of the time I’m skimming for text that might mention Grist, so I try to avoid slowing down by reading for comprehension, at least on busier days. While I take the time to read very few stories in full on any given day, I probably see hundreds of headlines. So, for example, today I found out from the Guardian that “White House knew Katrina scale,” but I have no idea who knew what, when they knew it, or from whom. I read on TomPaine.com that “Bush, Cheney and Rove put national security below their goals of increasing presidential power and winning elections,” but I don’t know how they did it or what that means for national security or citizens like myself. Not only that, I’ve probably read a dozen summaries of those different stories (yeah, we’re a left-leaning publication) all restating variations of the same idea.
Then again, I also spend a lot of time tracking blogs like Think Progress, Worldchanging, and the Sierra Club Compass, which embody the other way in which I fail to engage appropriately with what’s going on in the world: I don’t actually bother to figure out what they’re talking about. A good example is the State of the Union address. I heard about Bush’s pre-speech interview in which he hinted that he’d bring up America’s “addiction to oil,” and I probably spent hours reading or at least glancing at heated commentary, but did I actually watch, listen to, or read the commentary of the speech? No way. The same goes for far too many worthy stories: I’ll see a headline in the Guardian that some scandal or other is breaking in Washington, and a couple days later I’ll get walloped with thousands of words devoted to minutiae related to the whole ordeal, but do I ever get the basic facts straight? I don’t, because it would be like trying to eat a main course after nine salads and seven desserts.
Will I ever get my facts straight again? Hard to tell. If I were, say, an apprentice carpenter or a barista or a ditchdigger I could probably avoid printed news coverage during the day, thus allowing me to enthusiastically dive into the paper once I got home. However, I’m probably much more likely to wind up at another job in front of a computer once my time with Grist is up, continuing to muddleheadedly wallow in punditry for the foreseeable future. So next time you effortlessly peruse the obituaries, disagree with an op-ed, or fill in the crossword, kindly keep me in your thoughts, won’t you?
Andy Slabaugh (http://andyslabaugh.blogspot.com) wrote a book review for the Wichita Eagle when he was in seventh grade.
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