News Networks

News is omnipresent and unsatisfying. It demands our attention but leaves us unfulfilled, dominated by a redundancy of limits which utterly defies the complex world we live in. How can the many news sources be so narrow in content, so unsatisfying to people of even minimum curiosity? This goes not only for Fox, but for NPR/MRP/WPR as well as PBS and the affiliates. Does this explain why so many people are finding their news sources on the Internet, or are there problems there too?

The other aspect I find difficult is what I call the cute-zee deliveries, the attempt to make things palatable via personalization (what the Spanish used to call personalizmo), humor and (as mentioned above) redundancy. Beating things to death is not intelligent, "dumbing down"

for the sake of ratings or advertisers just isn't justified in my view.

Hobby horses are another problem, indulged in even by the likes of Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales on "Democracy Now." Certainly it is justified at times to give more time to something that is being completely forgotten elsewhere; but when there is unnecessary redundancy in this one has to wonder about what is being left out because of it.

Because what is being left out is immense, and extremely instructive.

Fun

Much of life today seems to be "putting the cart in front of the horse." For example, expecting a fun time or a happy feeling when the elements of such feelings may be absent. It seems that every time you turn around one of these words is used in a kind of wishful thinking way. Does this have anything to do with being satiated by the things which are supposed to bring us satisfactions but do not?

My memory of early life includes a lot of satisfaction, but few if any accolades for the results that you got if things worked to provide it. Sports, parties & dinners, hobbies and pastimes all combined to provide satisfying times, even through we had much fewer personal resources at our disposal to finance things. Now-a-days everyone from the Dalai Lama to TV and radio commentators and advertisers seems to Hawking happiness or fun ... something is amiss.

I became interested in the derivation of "fun" the other day, and discovered that it is from a mixed bag of descriptors, including the one of making fun of ... It seems that there is something very forced about fun expectation, perhaps the same goes for happiness. Perhaps we had better go back to the activities which might provide one or other, or both. Otherwise we may get waylaid with a cart in the wrong place.