News
What is news? Webster defines news as, "A member of the tribe of Judah." Oh wait, that's Jews. My bad. Don't you just hate when people start a commentary with, "so-and-so dictionary defines dictionary as...well, this you jerkoff!"
News is this phenomenon whereby we sit around a television at some predefined time every day and have a pair of moderately not ugly people reveal to us a random cross section of what happened since the last time we performed this ritual. More often than not, this consists of crime. For whatever reason people absolutely love crime. Maybe it's a release which allows us to get angry at society at large for being so barbaric.
I'm not sure why else we would be so taken with news. We all know the percentages, that we're astonishingly unlikely to be raped or murdered by someone outside our family. I recently found that 97% of crime is within the same creed. For those of you scoring at home, it means that white women usually get raped and killed by white men, which is also the same for black, Latino, or any race. (As an aside, it's odd that Latino gets capitalized in my spell checker. Don't we White and Black people have any proper form? Oh right, we're Caucasian and Africa-American now. What are black people from Africa called? I once heard a sportscaster call an African athlete in the Olympics an African-American. The PC train is running way out of control.)
News is this vacuum of ratings where stations try to lure you in by showing you glimpses of how horrible someone else is. It's also this strange replay of how we have not learned anything from our past mistakes. Think about it. How many times have we seen a certain person of a certain race get killed in a certain neighborhood? Or how many times have we seen a certain country oppress a certain people and absorb the repercussions in the form of some certain other people blowing up their assumed oppressor? Or that some certain CEO is bilking the shareholders? It's a sordid cycle we find so fascinating. But if you took the news from a year ago and played it tonight, how many people would even notice the difference?
News is all of that, plus sports and weather. Let me save you the trouble. Some team beat another team. And it rained somewhere. Get outside and stop watching TV. You might learn something new, which would be real news.
News is this phenomenon whereby we sit around a television at some predefined time every day and have a pair of moderately not ugly people reveal to us a random cross section of what happened since the last time we performed this ritual. More often than not, this consists of crime. For whatever reason people absolutely love crime. Maybe it's a release which allows us to get angry at society at large for being so barbaric.
I'm not sure why else we would be so taken with news. We all know the percentages, that we're astonishingly unlikely to be raped or murdered by someone outside our family. I recently found that 97% of crime is within the same creed. For those of you scoring at home, it means that white women usually get raped and killed by white men, which is also the same for black, Latino, or any race. (As an aside, it's odd that Latino gets capitalized in my spell checker. Don't we White and Black people have any proper form? Oh right, we're Caucasian and Africa-American now. What are black people from Africa called? I once heard a sportscaster call an African athlete in the Olympics an African-American. The PC train is running way out of control.)
News is this vacuum of ratings where stations try to lure you in by showing you glimpses of how horrible someone else is. It's also this strange replay of how we have not learned anything from our past mistakes. Think about it. How many times have we seen a certain person of a certain race get killed in a certain neighborhood? Or how many times have we seen a certain country oppress a certain people and absorb the repercussions in the form of some certain other people blowing up their assumed oppressor? Or that some certain CEO is bilking the shareholders? It's a sordid cycle we find so fascinating. But if you took the news from a year ago and played it tonight, how many people would even notice the difference?
News is all of that, plus sports and weather. Let me save you the trouble. Some team beat another team. And it rained somewhere. Get outside and stop watching TV. You might learn something new, which would be real news.
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