Is Around the Clock News Good for Us?

Every morning while getting ready for work, I listen to one of the mainstream 24 hour news channels. Inevitably, each day they are reporting on something in which find absolutely pointless and better placed on Real TV rather than a “legitimate” news channel. Today they were going on about their 50 minute continuous news coverage some animals being rescued some flooded area of the flood plains. Didn’t see that one coming, did they?

So this got me thinking, how come the news seems so fixated on reporting mundane stories which only impact an incredibly small portion of viewers? Then it hit me, and I’m sure I’m not the first to realize this, but being required to report 24 hours a day means you have to come up with something to report. Well, there is only so much which applies to the majority of viewers so a bunch of fluff gets picked up and put on air.

The problem is, the news becomes far more like entertainment and much less about what is really going on in the world as it applies to you. Even worse than that, when viewers tune into the news, to get “legitimate” information, they are bombarded with all this fluff. After a while, they get trained to believe this garbage and nonsense is just as important to their lives as the bigger issues are.

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with all this or what, if anything, it means but all in all, I’m thinking 24 hour news channels have done society more harm than good. Does this mean I’ll stop watching or will issue a boycott? Hardly. I will continue doing what I do now and get the majority of my news from alternate sources (and as many as possible). Hopefully others will realize this and do the same but I seriously doubt that. Oh well…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under A Rant, My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.