“Old women over their tea”
“If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.”
In Walden’s “What I Lived For” chapter, Henry David Thoreau elegantly expresses his frustration with the belief that well informed people are those who read newspapers. The cranky naturalist and philosopher had little tolerance for endless accounts of, as he says, “one cow run over on the Western Railroad.” According to Thoreau, if you’ve read one police-blotter account, you’ve read them all and can concentrate your energies on doing something more valuable than reading the newspaper. (Of course, Thoreau didn’t think much of the post office either; elsewhere he says that one or two important letters were it for the services that office had rendered him in his lifetime.)
I thought of his old women over their tea tonight as yet another cable news network barrage of nothing but Clinton/Obama news filled hours of programming while I made dinner, ate and then sat down to write. I asked my husband, “Isn’t there anything else going on the world?” We have both been frustrated that the coverage of the civilian murders of Palestinians, the incarcerations of civilians at Guantanamo, the signs of the coming recession and, closer to home, health care for the uninsured isn’t receiving the same overblown coverage as the race between the Democratic challengers. We know whom we’re supporting and the nonstop campaign coverage doesn’t serve us or the undecided voters well. If anything, voters will be sick of the issue by the time November 4 arrives.
Truthfully, I try to stay away from TV news as much as I can. I get most of my news by reading Web news sites and not watching cable news. Other than the very entertaining and sometimes unbridled Keith Olbermann on MSNBC or C-SPAN’s public affairs programming, there’s not much value in the rehashed reports and overdone graphics of network or cable news. My sister and I were amazed recently that millions of people rely on Katie Couric, of all people, for their news. If you’d told Americans in the 1950s that they’d be getting their nightly news from Betty Furness, they would have laughed.
Luckily, there’s more of what’s happening in the world on one Antiwar.com page than in a couple of hours of CNN. The pictures are prettier or more scary on cable, but there’s all the depth of a thimble in their coverage.
On Sunday, C-SPAN featured a Book Talk interview with journalist Anthony Lewis, who discussed his new book, Freedom for the Speech We Hate. Lewis’ subtitle claims his book is a biography of the First Amendment and his discussion of the implications of Supreme Court cases, privacy issues and the original intent of the framers of the Constitution was fascinating. That, to me, was good TV.
The same talking head commentators on CNN talking about every minute of the Presidential campaign say the same things every day. They dissect every action, every word and every square root of their ads. Meanwhile, terminally ill people in America don’t have access to health care, funding for education is in peril and civilians by the hundreds are dying in Palestine. Kevin, my husband, received a slide show a few days ago from a Palestinian friend who warned him that its images were graphic.
He was right. We could barely look at the human bodies turned into pieces of meat by bombs and bullets. Our daily newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, today “balanced” its coverage by showing two grieving families–one Palestinian and one Israeli. Both depicted children crying over their losses, but the cutlines told the story. The Palestinian girl’s relative was one of more than 100 dead civilians and the Israeli boy’s relative was one of two soldiers killed. Palestinian men and boys throw rocks like David, but this time Goliath has drones, mortars and missiles to take to the fight.
Our newspaper’s “equal” coverage was surely designed to avoid getting letters from the pro-Israeli lobby that refuses to acknowledge one iota of the suffering of Palestinians. As a joint letter from one of those groups pretty much stated in our paper recently, well, that’s what they get for their goal of wanting to destroy the Israeli state. I flashed back to that comment when I saw the faces of the children crying over dead relatives on the same newspaper page. “There is only one child in all the world, and that child’s name is All Children,” wrote Carl Sandburg in his text for the photo exhibit The Family of Man.
Unlike Thoreau, I love newspapers. I was trained as a journalist and there’s nothing like starting the day with print, even though I’m frustrated by the narrowness of the daily paper that arrives on our lawn each morning. Thank God for Web access to a multitude of points of view in news sites and blogs that lessens our reliance of one newspaper or the three broadcast channels of the old days. At least now, C-SPAN and a selective viewing of cable news can provide some perspective on issues and trends.
It’s refreshing not to rely on old ladies over their tea for news anymore.
