We assume that being well informed is good for you; that watching the evening news, listening to talk radio and reading newspapers is going to make you a better person. I’m not so sure anymore.
There was a time before I cared.
As a child in the 1980s I’d be watching something on my beloved JVC video player, the one with the giant, primary-coloured buttons, fingerprinted with peanut butter and mud. (More peanut butter than mud, since I spent more time eating sandwiches than playing in the garden.)
There I was, lost in Different Strokes or Indiana Jones or my Michael Jackson music video collection. But, inevitably, at 8pm my dad would walk in, switch to the news and we had to watch all the way to the weather. It was a grim, certain termination of anything that meant anything to me.
At some point I changed my mind. It was, after all, the ’80s in South Africa and TV news was fun, if only to hear the newsreaders try to keep down the panic in their gullets, like throwing a blanket over a basket of demon kittens.
It was also around the time I found out I was shortsighted (I’d been walking into walls for a year), started wearing glasses and assumed, as children do, that glasses made me smarter than everybody else.
News is crack for smarty-pantses. Today I’m a crack whore.
Are you one too? Do you, like me, need dozens of confirmations a day that Robert Mugabe is, indeed, still president of Zimbabwe? That Gordon Brown is beside himself? That our own president is working tirelessly to complete the final triplet of his latest sestina?
I like to know this stuff. I need to look good at the next party, saying controversial, sexy things that begin: “What the West doesn’t understand about —”
You know, things that make the boys grumble and the girls swoon.
But how many times do I really need to hear it? Because I listen closer each time they tell me.
I typically buy the daily newspaper, listen to news on the radio in the car, check in on news websites a couple of times a day and have all sorts of alerts sent to my cellphone.
Since I started earning an income, I feel the need to get the business news too, just in case they lower the price of Brent crude and I want to rush out and buy a barrel.
(Who is this “Brent”, anyway? “Brent” sounds like the guy who, well into his 30s, manages to drop into every conversation that he schooled at Michaelhouse. Big deal, Brent. No wonder the oil market’s a mess.)
I have this friend, also a smarty-pants, who offered me the “different perspectives” excuse for his own news addiction. I don’t know.
Sure, with the big stories, the degree and direction of propaganda varies depending on who is serving them up. But you and I are grown-ups and do not honestly believe that news and spin have ever been or could ever be separated, or that truth can be dispensed in boxes of blister-packed pills.
Of course, more voices are better than fewer. Even so, much as I would like to avoid being shouted at by Mahendra on SABC, I am having trouble being enthusiastic about e.tv’s 24-hour news channel.
One of eNews’s anchors is Jeremy Maggs, a man who compensates for a lack of insight by, a) emphasising almost all the words of every sentence, b) accompanying each of these words with a purposeful nod of the head and, c) having unusually large nostrils.
They are very impressive nostrils. Mesmerising in their magnitude. I have been tuning in just to see if he someday accidentally inhales his lapel microphone or a piece of the set. News editor Debora Patta prefers to hire people with noses at least as engaging as her own.
Twenty-four-hour news channels are like soap operas, every time you tune in, the characters are in a holding pattern, wearing the same clothes and permanently on the verge of something dramatic.
Then the music swells and we cut to commercials.
So accustomed are they to layering the fanfare, fireworks and bunting over the ordinary and old-hat that they seem genuinely confused when real news bangs the door down.
Still, I watch, getting the same story over and over again and each time I say: “Really? Really?! Is it true? — It is! Well, tell me again!”
And boy, do they deliver. They do it the way you get an indifferent dog interested in a biscuit.
You shove it in its face, then pull it away, then shove it again, then pull it away, then shove, pull, shove till it thinks: “Wow. That must be some biscuit.”
It’s not.