In Other News

The holidays have been over for a while, and I bet some of us are not eating as much. Not necessarily because of a New Year’s resolution. Maybe we just can’t. It’s almost a natural cycle of over-indulgence followed by abstinence.

I’ve been thinking about our news consumption over the past couple of weeks. The impeachment trial got underway in earnest. It’s something we’ve done only three times in history, so naturally, that’s just about all our major domestic news media, especially the cable news channels, were serving up, for days on end, in great big heaps.

Now, this is a terrible thing to say, but it took a tragedy to bring relief from the ubiquitous impeachment story. I found myself focused on something else: the death of Kobe Bryant and eight others in the Sunday helicopter crash north of L.A. Grief took over as the dominant feeling, replacing the outrage and/or boredom produced by the happenings in Washington. But then the Bryant story took over everything.

The major news media scramble to fill our plates with as much of what is top-of-mind at the moment, and often that item obliterates everything else. Nobody  would argue that these mega-stories aren’t worthy of the attention bestowed on them. They are.

 Is there anything wrong with this picture? If there’s a problem, it maybe unbalance, not just for the media covering such stories, but for the consumer. There are remedies: the plain-vanilla network news shows on local TV channels do tend to cover at least a couple of more things than just whatever elephant of the day is in the room, under the heading, In Other News. Another strategy for escape is to find the BBC or some alternate major broadcaster from an English-speaking country with an online stream, some locale where our own wall-to-wall stories don’t get that kind of play. Or, try something like – dare I say it – radio, or a newspaper (remember those?).

There is also the nuclear option – unplugging. I know people who go cold turkey on news consumption, but I also know it doesn’t last. Even if we tune out, there is always something to bring us back and feed our variety of appetites. This weekend, it will be the 

Super Bowl.

But hey, I shouldn’t complain too much. We all need these shared experiences to bring is out of our bubbles and silos, even temporarily – places where many of us spend entirely too much time.