Wednesday 20 February 2013

Lack of News.

Yippee!   For a whole twenty-four hours the BBC News was curtailed by a strike.   The local bulletins were only five minutes long and even the national one was shorter than usual.

Why I have to watch the whole thing I don't know - it is almost as though I am afraid to miss something.   At least we make it just once a day - from 6pm to 7pm and that does make it an hour's enforced rest, which is also a good thing.

But really so much of the news is so trivial, a lot more is sensational and very little is necessary.   It struck me that at one time Syria, with the dreadful killing there, was headline news.   But now it seems to have been put on the back burner, as though it is no longer of interest, although there is no dying down of the fighting.

And what a lot has been made of Hilary Mantel's comments about the Duchess of Cambridge - she says she has been misinterpreted - and what a lot of nonsense it is too.   I smiled as I thought of Victorian times, when a pregnancy in the Royal Family would have meant a complete withdrawal from society.   Now the opposite is true, with all newspapers advertising her 'bump' yesterday.   Couldn't there be a happy medium?

I am still reading Cees Nooteboom's 'Roads to Santiago' and he sums up the news brilliantly I think, with this passage:-  while driving in Spain he says ' the car radio gargles and splutters with election results, fresh history which, eventually, will be condensed along with all the rest into the indigestible soup of one page of print, all those millions of words, facts, gestures, images and promises which took as much time as they needed to come to pass, only to be crushed, pounded and compressed into a single book, a single chapter, a single page, a single sentence,a microdot in a future that will no longer be ours.'

Quite so.   

10 comments:

Heather said...

I have often thought that the almost hourly news bulletins and programmes have reduced the impact and interest of our current news items. Maybe limiting the newspapers to four sheets (or was it pages) as was the case during the war, would make editors consider the content of each edition more carefully.

Pomona said...

I love it when Radio 4 has these news-free days - they put on such interesting programmes instead!

Pomona x

it's me said...

I never turn on the radio or tv during the day, and only watch one newscast in
the evening. Mostly they're a bunch of talking heads. I have better things to do.

Gwil W said...

Here is the news. The war continues. Another war is imminent or at least on the cards. The old war may be over soon a spokesman has said. In some faraway country some people are starving. In another faraway country some people have no drinking water. A meeting of bankers and industrialists has made an important announcement: the next meeting will be in Switzerland.
And so to the weather. It will be cool/ warm/ normal for the time of year. There may be rain / showers / no rain (delete as appropriate). And finally here is some breaking news: At CERN in Switzerland scientists have discovered a body nobody understands. It transpired that Charles and Camilla had become separated during a tour of the Large Hardon Collider.

Cloudia said...

You would not believe the trivial, insubstantial, pun factory of our American "news!"





ALOHA from Waikiki
Comfort Spiral
~ > < } } ( ° > <3

ChrisJ said...

We are overwhelmed with an abundance of trivial information in this age. What a relief to turn off the TV and have some blessed quietness.

ArtPropelled said...

I like the quote very much. It hits the nail on the head doesn't it?!

Gwil W said...

No news is good news.

Rachel Phillips said...

Yes, I too enjoyed the News strike. I turned on Radio 4 for Eddie Mair before the 6.0 Clock News and got a lovely programme about George Orwell instead; wonderful.

The Weaver of Grass said...

Seems we are all agreed/ Does everyone feel like this? If so then why do they do it I wonder. Thanks for calling.