One night my friend, Mary Pratt, who was a little girl at the time, asked her father, Walker Percy, who was a well-known writer, why he watched the news every night.
His reply was simple and to the point. He said, "I have to check to see if the world stopped turning and we all need to jump off."
Now in her seventies, she loves telling me about this memory. She was like all children growing up back in the day when there was only one TV in the house and what the dad wanted to watch was what the family watched.
I remember rolling my eyes at the evening news that my father watched while our mother cooked dinner in the evenings. He would watch it again at 10:00, but by then we were upstairs in bed for the night. We knew the news had ended when the introduction song to MASH began to play. Once the 30-minute re-run was over the house fell silent.
What I did not know, which Mary Pratt told me recently, was that when she was a small girl the news only lasted for 15 minutes. And when I asked her how on earth they covered everything in 15 minutes she explained that it was easy because the Walter Cronkite's of the world simply came on and covered the day's events and that was it.
When I got to thinking about it, if one simply covers what happened in the world during a day, 15 minutes would just about do it. And yet, we have reached a time when the news runs 24 hours a day. And not only the main three networks but multiple other networks. And the angle the news is being delivered blows back and forth like a tree blowing in the wind. They are exactly the same events which occurred that are being reported, but from totally different perspectives --- which leaves me wondering if that is really reporting the news?
I have begun to write about this topic numerous times but chose a different path because it seems to be a touchy subject for diehard fans of certain networks. I can report that during the pandemic when my blood pressure spun out of control one of the requests from my doctor was to turn off the news and dial life back for 30 days. This seemed to be a great prescription because in the evenings when I would normally begin to start feeling ramped up, watching a sitcom or listening to music changed my entire state of mind.
My husband tells me that if something horrible happened in the world I would not even know about it because I do not watch the news. I tell him I will be fine because he does. But I have even managed to curtail the period of time he watches it at the end of the day. After an hour of the local news and the world news there is not much more to know other than listening to fifteen other people take turns talking about their opinion of what has happened in the day. And after that will come fifteen more.
As ironic as it may seem, I actually began college at 18 years old majoring in journalism. I wanted to be a reporter most of my growing years. And the last thing I ever wanted to be was a teacher --- which I am. As it turned out, I bombed my one and only journalism class in college. The professor ripped my papers to pieces because I gave too much of my opinion in my papers and seemed to have an impossible time sticking to the W's. Who, What, When, and Where. It turns out I had quite an opinion myself back in the day and cable television was just surfacing on the horizon, and it seemed the professor cared about my opinion just as much as I care about these opinions today.
He did suggest I consider a different type of writing if I was determined to be a writer. And in a little more than a decade that seemed to begin to unfold.
So, coming to you live from Foreman Hill, the world has not stopped turning so no need to jump off. We may need a bit more news than 15 minutes a day because inquiring minds do want to know.
