What makes me chuckle, especially on Sky, is the way sometimes they’ve obviously struggled to get someone important on to ask their opinion.
So they’ve ended up with someone who’s completely obscure or unknown, or a man in the street
We sit there going “who the heck is that?” and “why do we care what they think?”
It was bad when the Queen died and they were so desperate to fill the slots they rolled in anyone who had ever had anything to do with her, however distantly
If the poor Queen had really had all those “special” relationships and conversations, she wouldn’t have had time to walk the corgis!
In my opinion it’s done because it can be done and it’s a kind of vicious circle with everyone passing the buck. There was an interesting discussion on TV the other day where this was elaborated on. Journalists claimed they’d do it because “the people” expected them to, adding if they didn’t break this news, somebody else would and that was unacceptable because they’d lose readership and viewers. They also referred to the ongoing competition among journalists to be the first. If journalists then do so, there’re others who complain about the bombardment. After all, it still is attention economics having to cope with a continuously waning attention span of the addressees.
I’m sure that there are people like me who get a bit obsessed with things at times (on some kind of sporadic OCD scale??), which makes it harder to turn off than Joe average, and which goes through a minor period of mourning/withdrawal symptoms when the event has reached its inexorable climax ( behave yourself @Vlad).
This sort of endless broadcast from dawn to dusk really doesn’t help!!
I stopped watching the news. I used to have the BBC as my homepage when I turned on my computer in the mornings. It sometimes made me angry, and that would set the tone for the day. Sometimes you can spot an agenda, especially on the beeb. And sometimes its what they omit or don’t report that gives you a totally different take on a situation and I feel that I’ve been manoeuvered into a conclusion. I get suspicious when I don’t hear both sides of a story, and it sorta proves that I’m being pushed into a certain direction.
I do listen or watch the news but not too deeply because it can make me feel low in myself . I know stuff is happening as I try to be knowledgeable but I won’t let it get into me . I do think it can affect our mental health and outlook as news is all very deep sad and distressing . There is nothing we can do about awful things happening , nowadays we hear so much of violence too .
It’s more about making some stories addictive through 24/7 coverage for a few days/weeks, and then moving on, leaving us go cold turkey until our next fix from another story to embed ourselves in.
).
