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.