©2011 Haji Shearer
For over six months I’ve been on a news fast. For years I was getting more and more frustrated with the insipidness of the media. I’m not just talking supermarket tabloids or old school newspapers, but the whole shebang. I used to listen to NPR on my commute to and from home; I’d scan the Boston Globe online version while at work. If I got home around 6:30, which was often, I’d transition into the house with Brian Williams and later in the evening, I’d check out events from an African-American perspective on theroot.com and sometimes hit the Christian Science Monitor’s website for a different take on world events.
Yet, more and more, I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was all bullshit. Random House defines news as “reports of recent or new events.” Recent maybe, but this shit sure as hell wasn’t new. Every day, it was the same old crap, recycled by the same old tired voices. If there was a “big story,” which could be anything from a storm to a terror attack, that led the program and got looked at from every conceivable, superficial angle that could be mustered. I felt like I would scream if I saw one more “newscaster” asking some schmo out for a walk in a storm, “Have you had enough snow yet?”
If there was no big story, politics dominates with the expected bias determined by who paid the bills. And, don’t get me started on the self-absorbed meteorologists who get twice as much time as they need to tell me their weather guess for the next day, or the parochial sportscasters who treat the neighboring city like it’s full of Stalinists in 1947.
“New” media on the web is rarely better – same old crap, different format. When I turned away from a newscast, paper or website, rather than feeling edified, I often had that uncomfortable feeling I used to get after looking at porn. Like, watching this may not have been the worst thing I could have done, but I have wasted part of my life that I will never get back. I sometimes thought about not participating in the sham, but voices in my head about being an informed citizen always kept me going back.
The oil “spill” finally got me. By the end of June 2010, I felt like I would go insane if I turned on the TV or clicked onto the net and saw one more image of British Petroleum’s crude oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. I decided on a voluntary ban on radio, TV, paper and internet news. The thing about big stories is as much as these disasters affect my world, knowing the ugly daily details are just about useless. Maybe some people were inspired to stop driving, but the connection between our cars and the oil disaster is minimized, or non-existent, in the news cycle.
During September 2001, I probably spent 100 hours absorbing information on the Terrorist Attacks. Most of it was irrelevant to my life. I learned little about the poverty in Afghanistan, or how British colonial rule devastated the region. The media got me all jacked up to keep coming back and consume the meaningless trivia they reported. I was addicted to news crack. It wasn’t nourishing. It didn’t improve my quality of life. And most of the time, it wasn’t even fun.
Contrast my 9/11 or BP Oil disaster experience with the recent big story of the Arizona Congresswoman shot at a political rally. Without consuming media, I learned she’s a Democrat, was shot in the head and – amazingly – survived. That over a dozen other people were shot, many died, that Sarah Palin had targeted this woman’s (district) in crosshairs on her website and consequently many (typically left) commentators were blaming Palin for the rancorous mood that lead to the killings. Oh, and according to some media, it wasn’t an actual “terrorist,” but a “young, mentally ill, white man” who caused all the mayhem.
I got all this from talking to folks and reading friends’ FB posts. That’s all I need to know. I feel all the compassion I can for the Congresswoman without hearing the day by day details of her struggle for life, and I have as much empathy as possible for the homegrown terrorist without knowing the details of how his mind got so twisted. Enough already! I want to focus on more life affirming ideas.
So what am I doing with the time I used to devote to “news?” I used to enjoy screen time especially when I eat, so sometimes I watch stand-up comics on YouTube or presentations on ted.com. The Ted presentations are news for me to a degree that the pabulum on newscasts could never be. And when I finish a Ted talk, unlike when I visit most news sites, I’m thinking about constructive solutions rather than focusing on depressing problems. And the insightful social commentaries given by the brilliant comics I love are still as relevant as when Chris Rock, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and others, first delivered them. I’m also reading more books and magazines when I eat, talking to people or, get this, thinking about the food I’m eating.
When I started my news fast on July 1, I committed to doing six months, so I could have started back on January 1, but I realized I didn’t want to. Unlike porn, I don’t really miss it.
