Useless News

Tabloid News - Too much time is spent on tabloid news. It’s a gossip column woven into daily reports. It spends an inordinate amount of time on who said what and what that might mean and when we might have an answer on what that might mean.  It spends very little time on useful news. 

Minutiae News - News is full of minutiae. It is short on facts and long on speculation and innuendo over motives. It’s a soap opera.

The Minutiae News covers events that don’t impact us directly. Whether or not investigative journalist or former spy is murdered in another country or whether or not Christine Ford was making out at a drunken high school party doesn’t affect us directly. It is a morality play offered to direct us to play “ain’t it awful” and weigh in to oppose bad behavior.

Disaster news doesn’t cover much about what buildings survived and how they were built to withstand hurricane winds and water surges. It covers interviews with victims so we can play “ain’t it awful”.

This coverage is designed to cultivate our interest in “victims”, but doesn’t cover much about how to avoid being a “victim”.

Barn Side News - The pejorative saying: ‘Your aim is so bad you couldn’t hit the side of a barn’ applies to journalism in the US today.

The media covers 10% of what you might need to know and 90% of what you may have no need to know. This is “one-size-fits-all” news. We are all selective about what we read and listen to.

If you live or work in a crime-ridden area, you need to know the amount and kind of crimes being committed close to where you work and live. If you don’t live or work in a crime-ridden area, your need to know isn’t as great.

If you have one of the rare conditions described in TV Pharma commercials, you may be interested. The rest of us are not interested, but we are amused at the serious side-effects these drugs claim to cause.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader