No news is good news
I don't watch the news any more.
There was a time when I used to watch the six o'clock news on RTE just to see Sharon, but since I dumped her I don't see the point any more. Every now and then I might watch it in the background, and last night was one of those occasions. All they seemed to want to tak about was this damned Olympic "scandal" that has something to do with tickets or ticket-touting or something. If the Olympics rate a 9 on the Richter Scale of boredom then this "news" is surely an 11 or 12.
This morning I opened up a couple of meeja sites and they were the same – more tedium about the Olympic rubbish and a half hearted mention of an earthquake in Italy.
The Indo didn't even bother with the earthquake and headlined more mind numbing shit about the Rio ticket touting. Their other articles concentrated on some scumbag who was beaten up in Dublin and something someone said on the Rose of Tralee thing, like I give a shit.
Further down there was a shock horror article about a plane making an emergency landing which turned out to be absolutely nothing, and earth shattering headlines such as "New mum says employer's failure to facilitate breastfeeding is 'shameful'" and "Moment firefighters thrown from boat during sea rescue in Jersey" [they got straight back in].
The latter article is a perfect illustration of the way the meeja has gone these days – just scrape Farcebook or YouTube and there's your story. Gone are the days of the cub reporter rushing out, notebook in hand to report on the latest news. Now it's an office full of interns trawling Farcebook, Twitter and YouTube in search of the "amazing", "startling" or "Must See".
The only pieces that seem to have any value at all these days are the opinion pieces, but these are basically blog posts in print. And that is the bottom line. The Interweb has taken over. If you want the up to date stuff that isn't biased then do your own trawling of the Interweb.
All the stuff is irrelevant anyway. What care I if a woman in America decides to kill her baby by bunging it in the fridge? Why should I give a flying shite if Clinton's emails are to be published before the election? Some of those items are nasty, but then the world is a nasty place at times [and I don’t need to be reminded of the fact]. Other items are just plain 'so what?'.
Now if the mountain behind me decided to be a volcano and to erupt and there was lava flowing in my direction I might want to know about it.
But I think I would probably know before the meeja anyway?
Media was always this shit – Just more obvious now that people have internet access
Now, Is that a mountain behind you or is it a hill?
I suppose some would call 'em hills but we call 'em the mountains. They might not be Alps or Pyrenees but we like them just as they are.
You got it good. Front page of today's Scotsman newspaper (it were a free one at a hotel bar in Aberlady) was the earth shaking news that a supermarket removed the saltire from it's punnets of soft fruit. Worse, they replaced it with a Union Jack.
http://www.scotsman.com/news/odd/tesco-removes-saltire-from-fruit-after-english-complaints-1-4210178
Oh, and on page three of the same rag was an article about Ms. Sturgeon (the boss politician here) stating she'll have the legislation in place for yet another "independence" referendum in a fortnight.
Backside before boob.
Ah! The tried and trusted EU method. Keep voting until you get the right answer!
You dumped Sharon? There's news I must have missed. So what happened? you're among friends here, it'll go no further!
She was depressing me. All she could talk about was bad news. I miss the bits where she wasn't talking though.
I never watch any of the main line news services like BBC,CNN or SKY its complete bulls*** all lies pushing the EU or that witch Clinton. The Irish Independent on line I look in and comment now and then but notice anything about banks or Brexit they don't allow comments. I get my news for sites like inforwars.c0m.
An Irish overpaid elite in jail in Rio now that's good news.
Yer Man in Rio sounds like a piece of work all right. Mind you, I would dearly love to know why our gubmint is holding a non-judicial [i.e. pointless] enquiry into the matter. What the fuck has it got to do with them? More tax payer's money down the drain.
In no particular order.
It's not the world that's a nasty place at times, it's people. A person is usually fairly decent and reasonably intelligent–usually. People are dumb, stupid, ignorant, panicky animals which is often made worse when they actually try to think.
I stopped watching the news on TV when Walter Cronkite retired in 1981. 10 years later I chucked watching TV altogether and only kept the set for watching movies. First VHS and then DVDs. Life was suddenly much better because of this. I've pretty much stopped reading the news online as well for sake of what's left of my mental health.
Now I tend to watch video compilations of people doing stupid shit while I sit in my chair laughing maniacally.
They'll be coming for me any day now…