It occurred to me last night while I was preparing dinner and watching news stories flick by on the TV, that when I was a kid, and well into my twenties, I rarely paid attention to the news of the day, and as a result of not knowing what dastardly events were transpiring around the world, I had a much more optimistic outlook on life.
When we were little, coming into the house and finding Dad watching “the News” was sure to elicit at least one disappointed “awww”, if not several. Although, back in the day of just three-channels of TV, from five to seven PM usually all you could find was local news or network news.
Dad was fond of Huntley and Brinkley, which I recall was on NBC, and was sponsored by Texaco. My Grandparents favored Walter Cronkite on CBS. I don’t recall anyone watching ABC for news, and reading a list of news anchors for the network from that time period just doesn’t ring any bells in my head.
But, as a kid, the news was right up there with Lawrence Welk and all the talking head shows on Sundays for awful TV. We’d much rather watch Petticoat Junction or Green Acres or Captain Kangaroo or Bonanza.
Our little town had a weekly newspaper, but I don’t recall seeing it around our house. My grandparents got it, but since it didn’t have funny papers, I didn’t pay it much attention. Usually one of us kids got sent down to the corner store with a quarter on Sunday mornings and we’d have to lug the Sunday Palm Beach Post back so that Dad could read it. We had to wait until he finished before we could devour the funnies.
Later in the 60’s after the Vietnam war heated up, and the protests at the Democratic National Convention happened, I became much more aware of the news, and I recall about 1968 that we stopped turning off the TV to eat dinner, it was a weird year, with lots of scary things going on in our world.
But, with the single exception of the assassination of JFK, until I was about 12 or so, I paid little attention to the news, and I think I was a much happier person.
Sure, it is a responsible and adult act to stay informed on current affairs, but I’m not really sure if we gain anything from all these 24-hour news channels. CNN Headline news at least has the decency to just repeat a half-hour worth of news every 30-minutes, dropping out older stories as newer ones come in, but for many of these news outlets, they reach out and report on news that really doesn’t need to be reported.
While I’m sure it is a local tragedy, why do the residents of Denver need to know about a toddler drowning in North Carolina? Why do we need to know about a murder on the other side of the country from us? We know about these things because all these 24-hour news channels need material, so they reach out further and further and cover stories that would otherwise be only a local event.
I think that all this unnecessary news about events far-far away cause us stress that we don’t need. It’s bad enough that we should pay attention to national politics so that we can cast our informed vote, we don’t need to know about general crime in a city so far away from us that we have to take a plane to get there.
As an innocent child, we are usually unaware of events going on around us. I know now that some of our innocence is maintained because our parents choose to keep bad news from us, but most of the time, when we are young, any current event of greater magnitude than “we’re out of popsicles mom!” just isn’t important to us.
It is hard to avoid news in today’s world of 24-hour news channels and internet, with news spreading around the world in seconds, but I think I’m going to try and start filtering out some of it. I don’t want to be any less informed about things that are important, but I don’t need to know everything about everything.