Daily Lack of News (original) (raw)

I don’t usually write much about my school assignments on either of my journals, but in this case, I found a bit to discuss in the research that really doesn’t relate to the class. What the assignment involved was watching the same local news broadcast three days in the same week, and then examining them from the perspective of an archivist about fifty years in the future, focusing on the principles of archival appraisal. Beth suggested I go with the Fox 29 News at 10, because it’s just so ridiculous, and she wasn’t wrong in that.

The local Fox affiliates’ news broadcasts aren’t directly related to the Fox News Network, but they seem to have the same general sense of thinking the viewers are idiots and telling them to be outraged at certain things. It’s hardly an original complaint that local news sources are often pretty absurd. I remember when I was in sixth grade in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and my social studies teacher was indignant that our local paper didn’t even mention this on its front page. I think that might have been the same issue that talked about how much better the other schools in the district were than the one we were attending, but I could be wrong about that. Maybe someone in the county had grown a rutabaga that vaguely resembled Oprah. I don’t know. It seems like local news sources are often like that about huge international stories, though, and the Fox 29 News in the past week tended to place the Egyptian protests somewhere lower in priority than, say, a story about how employees of the Delaware River Port Authority are receiving free E-ZPass tags, which of course comes out of THE VIEWERS’ TAX MONEY. I have to think that, if this is the worst use of tax money you can think of, you’re in pretty good shape. Another story I loved, in the sense of finding the way they presented it totally absurd, involved the possibility of the government granting vouchers to parents of students in failing schools, so that they could attend better ones. We were told we’d hear from “both sides,” and we did, but the guy in favor was allowed a rebuttal while the guy opposed was not. The thing was, the guy against it actually brought up some good points, but they apparently didn’t fit into the narrative the show was trying to sell viewing parents, which was presumably that anyone not approving this voucher system wanted YOUR kids to fail. While I’m not necessarily opposed to the voucher idea, I think it’s a very temporary measure. Isn’t taking kids out of failing schools and paying them to go to schools that don’t really need the extra money sort of robbing from the poor and giving to the rich? What about all the kids who have no choice but to go to the crappy school? Wouldn’t a better use of government money be to try to help THAT school? Granted, increased funding can’t really combat student (and parent) apathy, but is “let’s just give up on the struggling schools” really the message the State of New Jersey wants to send? Well, with Chris Christie in charge, the answer is probably yes, but I think anyone with an actual conscience might not be so down with it.

But I guess there’s not enough time for the news to discuss that in detail, as they have to move on to more important stories, like how many wings a couple of human garbage disposals can cram down their gullets. (Yes, that’s a real thing. It’s called the “Wing Bowl,” and it’s apparently been going on in Philly for a few years now, although I can’t recall hearing about it before.)