I'm Hooked

 

I was watching my grandson play the other day, and it was really interesting.

There he was, in a room full of toys, focusing intently on just one thing. Lego. He is a wizard at putting those plastic blocks together, and can do more with them at six than I can.

He played for close to an hour, then picked up his Switch, a Nintendo game, and was piloting a submarine to explore an alien spaceship that had crashed into the ocean.

He showed me the underwater plants, the exotic landscape, the sharks and other ocean life, and the little man he controlled in the game hopped and bounced and jumped as fast as he could press the control buttons.

My point? Well, he played and played and played. Two hours, three, four.  No crying. No fighting with his sister, just jump and swim and do all sorts of things on his tiny screen.

Which, I slowly realized, is what has happened to lots of us, including me. We’re not video game addicts, of course, just news junkies. Gotta see what’s happening. Gotta see what’s new. Gotta see how the other networks are reporting it.

We sometimes check the headlines on line. We could read the whole story in print, of course, but that always takes too long. A lot of us don’t really believe what we read, of course, so we do our research - let’s see what my friend has said about it on twitter.

That might not always be accurate, but it’s better than having to read two or three long stories and all those sidebars that tell us more than we really want to know.

Get it fast. Get it punchy. And, throw in some interviews with attractive people to make it more fun.

The amazing thing is, with a lot of us spending six or seven or even eight hours a day on line, there often isn’t any real news.

Which is my second realization. My blogging has gone down, and I thought it was just laziness. No, it’s not that. It’s just there is a lack of new things to talk about.

Let me explain, especially to younger readers who might think the 24-hour a day news cycle actually contains 24 hours of news. News networks just repeat earlier reports, which is actually a good thing to do. After all, some people may have missed them the first time around.

And real news - really honest-to-goodness the world is changing news - is getting harder and harder to find.

Meanwhile, you can tell when you’re watching too much warmed-over news. Last week I saw an outside expert on MSNBC talking about how smart Nancy Pelosi was being three separate times. He said the same thing, word for word, every time.

When I switched to Fox, I saw the same angry Trump supporter four separate times, complaining that Trump had really won the election. He didn’t change a word of his script either.

That, of course, made me think my complaint about a lack of new news was right on. After all, it’s hard to find something interesting to say when Mitch McConnell comes out against some Democratic bill, or when the Supreme Court upholds laws in Arizona or Alabama that makes it harder for minorities to vote.

Why? Because McConnell opposes just about everything. The only thing different is the words he uses. As for the court, McConnell gets the credit again for keeping a Democrat from filling empty court seats. We ended up with the Justices he wanted. 

Well, not much news there either. It is not news when you get wet going out in the rain.

And, those were the lead stories of the day.

Now I come from a time long ago when news had to be, well, news. At least for the big daily papers and the three television networks. Time and space were precious. As a print reporter, whenever I wanted another 200 or 300 words more for a story, it meant someone else’s story would be that much shorter.

Did we have a really good picture to go with what I was writing? Take out 350 words to make room for it.

When I did radio work, I would write a script and read it with a stop watch. A 90 second story had to last just 90 seconds, no more and no less.

Now, of course, we have networks that broadcast the same story endlessly - an hour or more of watching reporters in the field tell us they are waiting for a press conference to start, or pictures of a fire or a shooting scene looped over and over again. Then interviews with people who weren’t on scene giving us an instant opinion about the situation.

Well, we’re getting close to August, the traditional recess time for Congress. And the fire season will be in high gear for nearly half the country, followed by hurricanes that will come sweeping across the ocean to hit land somewhere.

Then, I think, there is an election coming up. Sometime in November, if I remember correctly.

No doubt I’ll see it on the loop. Over and over again. Along with those commercials that tell you what awful  things some candidate’s opponent did 15 years ago.

I’ll probably watch it all. After all, that’s what news junkies do.