The news is not unlike the storm, breeding a mood, feeding anxiety, promising the worst and then rolling off into some kind of electronic distance before hammering us. I attempt to bring some balance to my despair of it with such rationalizations as 'Had it been possible in 1599 or just 99 to report what was happening all over the world, would it not have been much the same? Tribes chopping one another to pieces, rulers rising and being toppled, crooks getting away with it, saints labouring on, prisons teeming, poets accusing and fools holding forth?'
–Ronald Blythe, Out of the Valley
The News
3 responses to “The News”
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Very good!
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This is what I’m always complaining about. We just can’t bear the weight of all the really terrible things that happen in the world, and, of course, what gets on the news is the worst of the worst. I just don’t watch the news.
AMDG -
Yes, and I think it also contributes to the sense of apocalyptic doom that a lot of people have, and the feeling that things are running very rapidly downhill. I’m sort of a mild news-watcher. We still get the local paper, and I read a fair amount of news on the net. I may have told this before, but when we got cable about 8 or 10 years ago (!), for a while we watched a certain amount of TV news–got into the habit of watching it while eating breakfast, for instance. One day we had just had enough. “I’m sick of these people.” And we haven’t watched it since, unless there’s some specific reason. It might be different if the TV news wasn’t so relentlessly superficial and frantic.
Light On Dark Water 
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