The Newspaper
I had a conversation recently with friends and they were talking about the newspaper. The conversation was about the newspaper and how it is full of depressing stories day after day after day. Many of them expressed their feelings and said that reading the newspaper depresses them so much that they don't want to read it anymore.
I was really surprised at this fact. I don't consider the newspaper to be depressing. It is what it is. I read the newspaper to find out what is happening in the world, good or bad. To say that everything in the newspaper is depressing is completely false. On the front cover of the Edmonton Journal there were two very different articles. One was about yet another suspected case of Edmonton Police Service brutality and the other was about Ministers and Pastors who are now using podcasts to spread their message further.
To me, ignoring the newspaper has two effects. One is that you don't know what is going on in the world or your city/town and as a result are not able to participate in current events discussions and be aware of the world around you. Secondly, by not reading the so called depressing headlines, you are either ignoring the problems or pretending that they don't exist. Is that a solution? I think it's another problem.
On a further note, the same people were discussing how there seems to be more problems in the world now than there ever have been. I disagree. Personally, I feel that the world is a smaller place with more news travelling faster to more places. Of course there is going to be more news because of that fact. As well, the population is increasing, allowing for more news stories every day.
Am I out of line for thinking this?
posted by David @ 11:39 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
These are two issues which, while definitely related, are somewhat disparate in terms of scope, in my opinion.
One thing I took from the journalism classes I took at Berkeley is that, for better or worse, the newspaper is, if not dying, severely weakened at the moment. The Internet has brought along new ways to disseminate information and the paper has become associated with the past, a relic of a time when news wasn't readily available 24/7 and when one had to wait till the morning to find out that so-and-so diplomat in China had been assassinated or that such-and-such baby had been saved from some fire in New York. However, while the paper is hurting, it may still be the most consistently excellent form of news in terms of its writing. Internet news is made to be in short, AP-form, directed towards people who don't want to read pages of news. Papers give the writer the freedom to explore the topic, to give a more complete story. But that doesn't really answer your question. Should people read the paper? Sure. But I would be fine with people not reading the paper so long as they sought out the news by other means and, more importantly, read the news critically, no matter what its source.
The second issue here is a helluva lot larger in scope. Are there more problems in the world today when compared to the past? Well, it's an impossible question to answer, of course. One could argue that, given the fact that technology has allowed a constant threat of annihilation to be possible with ICBMs, bio-warfare, etc... and the massive increase in disparity between poor and rich, that yes, there are more problems in the world than before. On the other hand, one could argue, given advances in medicine, information dissemination to keep an informed public, and a generally (or at least superficially) accepted agreement that diplomacy should at least be attempted, that no, there aren't as many problems. You're not out of line to say that people have greater access to information pertaining to the problems, and thus perceive that there are more of them. Ignorance can be bliss. But I've never liked the phrase "the world is a smaller place". If anything, the complexity of human interaction has only increased. The 'world' is growing and will continue to grow. Just because we have more access to each other doesn't mean that it's any smaller, it just means that we are adapting to the growth of our own consciousness.
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