News around the clock - Thinking not included
Since I do not have a permenant place to leave my computer setup until this weekend, I don't get the paper delivered, and there is no AM radio downstairs, all of the news I hear in the morning before heading out to work comes from the boobtube.

Needless to say, I'm not getting that much news.

Even though the 24 hour stations would like you to think that they are performing their jobs of keeping the public informed, I don't consider news to be just headlines. News is something that you have to think about. Getting an unbiased view is required, but to really feel a story you have to be acquainted with all sides of it, that makes you more apt to think about what you just learned, what your opinions of it are, and how it applies to your life.

But I have come to the conclusion that these 24 hour news networks (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CNBC, Headline News), they don't foster thinking. What they do is feed you a story that lacks details, and then they have that news scroll running at the bottom, throwing all sorts of different headlines at you, all of which provide even less details about the stories they are "reporting". So as you are trying to watch the story the anchors are reporting, you are inundated with all of these other headlines that you try to read while watching/listening to the other story. Your trying to grasp two things at once, before without clear details, so you're just being fed questionable facts and you have to spend all of your time paying attention just to keep up,it doesn't give you time to process the information and think about it for a little bit. Then it cuts to commercial after a few minutes, and the cycle starts all over again.

If that's not bad enough, people like me (and probably anyone else with a penis) have pruient interests to contend with. Let's face it: the female anchors that the 24 hour news channels hire are pretty cute, so sometimes our thoughts drift elsewhere. Shallow, but true. (Or maybe I'm just a dirty, dirty man.)

Trying to think about two or three differnt things at once tends to burn you out. When you are trying to learn about what's going on in the world around you, there are many complex issues that come into play and if our media just feds us headlines, we will not have a clear understanding of how our neighbors, local and global, feel, and what they are doing.

I guess it should come as no surprise that I hold a dim view of the mainstream news media and prefer to get my news from the radio or off the net. Not that the radio can be supremely better, and at times it can be downright awful, but at least you get details and there isn't a news scroll at the bottom of the screen to distract you.

The quality of the news your get off the radio depends on the station that you listen to. I like AM radio, but that certainly doesn't mean that I support Rush Limbaugh (or any other nationally syndicated AM talk show host that I have heard, for the matter), but NPR can be very good at times, and local talk shows can give you varying views and opinions. Now that I have DSL, I can feel listen to the great radio shows that I have links to. So that makes me happy. Radio shows usually have more time to air a story, and they don't have to worry about the visual aspect complicating things, so they can fit more information in a longer amount of time, and usually you see the difference in the quality of news.

But, for now, I will still spend my mornings as an ignorant slob. At least this routine is allowing me to get to work on time, I'm not hanging off the edge of my seat waiting for the next hard hitting news story that I simpy have to know about.