Why I hate 24-hour news
Oct 15th, 2007 by handolio
I seem to remember reading that every cigarette you smoke takes seven minutes off your life. If all you’re going to do in the extra seven minutes is invent equally smug statistics you might as well carry on smoking.
Another way to chisel away at your life expectancy is to watch 24-hour television news. I can’t prove that it actually lessens your days on God’s green earth, but hours spent watching it is time you could have been decomposing.
Perhaps I’m being harsh: if you think your three-score and ten does include time for dicking about with such a beginningless, endless, meaninglessly unfocused stream of consciousness, why not squander a minute and 20 seconds of it on this clip from BBC News 24.
Or discover more in less time by typing “pumpkin bus” into YouTube, from where you can find out that it’s an event hosted by Fir Point Farms in Oregon.
Now if only you’d had a journalist and a team of researchers to think of that.
24-hour news is less a news service than an art form. I think the problem may be that you haven’t watched enough – try three or four weeks of uninterrupted viewing and you really start to get into it.
You’re not the only one who has issues with 24hr news. Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe was devoted to the history of TV news last week. It was a hilariously brilliant disection of the format. BBC News24 and Fox News came in for detailed critical analysis. Well worth a watch if you didn’t see it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P2eCDGGBug
Nice to meet you today – hope we meet again soon!