Janet CollinsToo Much News!
July 15th 2010 12:49
When the ABC first started talking up its proposed 24 hour news channel and I could think of was why? There are news bulletins around us everywhere all day long on radio, the internet and on screens blasting across our city everywhere so why on earth would there be a need for more news?
Even as a self-confessed “news junkie” I cannot understand the need for yet another 24-hour news outlet. And that is from someone who regularly tunes into the ABC’s News Radio program where I can get a lot of news, not only locally or nationally, but internationally as well.
The trouble with having too much news is that the information is reduced to headlines. We get snit bits of this and of that. We hear it when we are lining up to buy our lunch or get a coffee.
There are still the old stock standard ways of finding out what is happening of course. We can get still grab a newspaper or listening to the morning radio or tv news while we are getting ready for work but news and information has now indoctrinated our lives completely.
There are screens just about anywhere you turn these days. They are in shops, cafes, shopping malls and even in office tower lifts. With all this new technology available to tell us what is happening every minute of every day, it seems to me that we are being totally saturated, even bombarded, with too much information. Or rather, too many headlines and not enough information.
This new obsession with news broadcasts also has a tendency to repeat and repeat the same things and, I can’t speak for anyone else but myself here, it can get rather boring and uninteresting and I know I can tune out if I hear too much of one subject. It is then that headlines become the story rather than the story itself.
It is good that we can at least feel as if we are well-informed but the current obsession with news bulletins beaming out at us all day every day is more inclined to reduce our level of interest in anything that is really important. We can really only take in so much. More likely we will only suffer from a sort of “news burnout”.
You only have to think about how much of the information we hear on these screens and on radio is really imminently important. Most of us do like to know what is really happening in the world and in our own country but how much of this information is so important we can’t wait till we get home to hear about it?
There are always disasters of some kind happening in the world and these make good headlines. There is politics too and the political upheavals that happen all the time, And then there is crime. All of these things are important and to be well-informed we have to keep up with them but that doesn’t mean we can’t read about them properly when we get home and have a bit of time to grasp the facts.
When we are hearing news bulletins all day long, every day, we face the problem of being over-informed and saturated and the things that are really important get buried beneath much of the mundane.
Too much information can be as bad as too little, at least for most of us. More quality news is what is really needed rather than more frequency. Will the quality suffer because of the quantity? We are yet to find out.
Image credit: www.abc.net.au
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