Today is the 23rd of January 2016.
Three weeks into my "no news is good news" resolution. Three weeks without looking at a newspaper.
Three weeks without listening to a news report on the radio or watching the ad bait programming that passes for news nowadays on TV.
"Three weeks"????
Yes, three, whole, long weeks.
So, how am I doing?
Surprisingly well. Is the answer.
I wrote "long" when describing how my news free weeks have seemed and I mean that in a positive way. I have more time to devote to other things now that I don't waste it looking at and reading "disaster porn" or stories about corruption here in Spain or in Ireland or in the US or the never ending war on an abstract noun "Terror".
How did this happen?
During the Christmas period I was off-line for a week while I went home to Ireland to visit family and friends. When I got back online, I went to Facebook and started scrolling through my accumulated non-read stories. I used to be a News Junkie, I suppose it is a by-product of having grown up listening to BBC Radio 4/World Service and working in Radio News for 96FM in Cork.
I had this need to be "up to date", to know what was happening in the world. It made me feel good to know that I knew things about events happening to people in remote parts of the planet. I am afraid to think about the number of days of my life I have spent in front of a computer screen scanning headlines from the NY Times, Huffington Post, El Pais, El Confidencial, The Irish Times, BBCnews.com France24, Bloomberg, etc, etc, etc,.This is only a partial list, look how long it took me to write it. Imagine how much of my life time I have lost in looking at these sites!
Getting back to Facebook. I started scrolling down the page on my wall, scanning the unwatched cat videos and unread news stories and suddenly I had a feeling of being overwhelmed by it all.
I saw so many negative stories coupled with negative photos. Stories and photos that have been manipulated just as much as junk food is, to provoke certain responses - in the case of modern "news/entertainment" to make me angry, scared or indignant.
Modern news is not a transmission of facts or information, it is a cynical exercise in manipulating the stories of unfortunate victims and the emotions of an audience who are watching while sitting at their kitchen tables. It is a symptom of the modern age, where image is more important than substance. Tragedy is trivialised to sound bites and eye candy to hold an audience's attention until the next ad break (and hopefully beyond).
So much of the "news" we read, see and hear really isn't. It is a ritual recycling of banalities. I remember this from my own days sitting in the newsroom in "Silly season" August, praying for a plane crash somewhere while rehashing tired, old stories to fill the 4 minutes until the sports report and weather.
To further illustrate my point, I can cite two examples from novels and one from cinema. In "A Clockwork Orange"(1962), Anthony Burgess writes a brilliant parody of the contents in a typical daily newspaper, one which is accurate even to the point of the country be paralysed by the thought that professional footballers might go on strike the following weekend. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), J.K. Rowling gives us a brilliant parody of a typical TV news bulletin where 29 minutes of death, destruction and dastardly deeds are ameliorated by a "And Finally" story, in Rowling's case, a 30 second clip of a water skiing budgerigar.
And finally in this part of my eviscerating exposition of the News industry, I want to talk about a great but now forgotten film from 1979, The China Syndrome. Jane Fonda's character is a newbie TV reporter doing a live report from the street. Her bosses and colleagues in the studio are unhappy with her report because it lacks "umph". They start making critical comments and question her ability until suddenly the tone of the story changes and a gyrating belly dancer appears in shot to whoops of joy and appreciation from the watchers in the control room. It was a visual comment/condemnation on and about the dumbing down of news and its merging with entertainment.
As I started clicking on and unfollowing all the different news feeds to my FB page, I had a feeling of release like when you start to throw out junk that you have stored in boxes for 10 years and never used. The sense of a weight lifting off your spirit is amazing. I know that it might seem that I am uncaring or selfish by not immersing myself and wallowing in the tragedy of other people's lives and sharing their emotions (oh how I hate the eternal journalistic question "tell me, how did you feel when...you saw your wife/children/mother, killed/maimed/disfigured (delete as necessary) - and if possible cry for the camera or wail for the radio microphone. What a stupid question. If someone kicked the reporter in the groin and asked "how did it feel or "what was your reaction when my boot connected with your nether bits?" I wonder what the response would be? Would the viewers/listeners feel moved by the tears rolling down the reporter's face?
All of the above thoughts flashed through my mind as I had my moment of epiphany. I suppose it is like when you have been binge eating on popcorn at the cinema. You buy a big carton of the unhealthy stuff and keep munching and munching and then there comes a point when your body says "enough", I can't or don't want any more of this junk / toxic crap.
At the start of the year I made a resolution connected with detoxifying my body, to "eat clean" and do more yoga and meditation.
On the 3rd of January I added a second one, to "read clean". By "clean" I mean not wasting my time on silly, improbable, spy/thriller/police drama novels - though I must admit I like Ian Flemming's 007 books and Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid series. Maybe I am being a bit too puritanical in my born again zeal to purify my mind so I will read Iron Druid 8 when it becomes available here.
So at the end of three weeks, how am I doing? Well, the changes are happening but not at a uniform rate. My running while listening to Buddhist monks chanting "Na myoho renge kyo" is having an effect, my expansive waistline is a little less vast. My sleeping is better (listening to the same monks singing a different version of the same chant) and I have more energy.
However, the biggest change I have noticed is in my thinking and attitude. I am less worried about the economy, less angry about the endemic corruption in the system here in Spain and at home in Ireland and not feeling so bludgeoned by the constant negative stories about things, places and situations I can do nothing about. What difference is it going to make to the latest attempt by mediocre, corrupt politicians attempting to fracture this country by turning their parts of Spain into tin-pot dictatorships if I start frothing at the mouth while reading the headlines before I go to bed?
None, zip, zilch, nada de nada. So the best thing is to avoid it and all the other stories that I can do nothing about. I have two kids, a mortgage and I am self employed in a country that is still waiting to see the famous "green shoots of economic recovery" - more than enough things to worry about. So for me as far as my Facebook page is concerned, as of today 23 January 2016, even though I am still going to look at the occasional silly cat video, no news, really is, good news.
UPDATE - in November 2018 I stopped using personal FB completely.
