Why "The News" Wastes Too Much of Our Time at Work
News will waste too much of our time at work. In fact, it will waste too much of our time in general.
We recently posted this comment regarding the distraction of "Daily News": Most of it's a lot of nothing. Over time, I've reduced my watching, listening, and reading "news" to the bare minimum. And I mean bare - maybe 5 minutes a day, at most 15.
If you already get this, good. It took me a number of years to fully recognize this and few more years to rein in my habits of reading/listening to the news - local and/or national. It was a struggle.
Why struggle? Well, ever since I can remember, I was a news hawk. Growing up, my parents would watch both the local news and the national news every week night on TV. The local lasted a half hour; the national a full hour. (It was subsequently shortened to a half hour, but back then it was a full hour.)
That's an hour and a half each and every night. And it doesn't count reading "the paper." (That's what we called newspapers then - the paper. We got the local newspaper delivered every day. And I read a good deal of it - maybe 20-30 minutes a day.
It all seemed important at the time. You wanted to "keep up with" the news. It was part of being "well informed."
In time, I moved from the local newspaper to the greatest of them all The New York Times. (At least that's what many of us thought at the time - and some still do.) Not only did I read the Times every day, I also got the Sunday Times. Indeed, part of being "real" New Yorker was spending a good chunk of your Sunday reading the Times. (Again, I suspect some New Yorkers still hold this to be sacrosanct.)
We actually believed that what was reported was true, that the news writers job was to report the news. Isn't that why they're called "reporters"? But over time, I began to see that reporters did more than report the facts. They would interpret those facts - if they even got them straight. Not only did they interpret, but it began to be clear that the majority of them leaned liberal-left in their interpretation.
As more people who didn't lean left noticed this, alternative sources sprung up. I think it started with talk radio, but these days it includes hundreds if not thousands of online sources.
Fair enough. But do these non-left/liberal leaning sources prove a more reliable source of objective fact? Not really. They offer an opposing interpretation most of the time. At least that's been my experience. In the end, "truth" remained elusive much of the time.
So after a number of years replacing the left-liberal sources with more "conservative" sources, the thought occurred that maybe news media - in any and all its forms - might not be the best source of truth. (Duh! - But, hey, sometimes I'm a slow learner.)
That's why these days I limit my time spent on "the news": a few minutes in the morning, unless some particularly important or maybe catastrophic event has occurred. And those few minutes typically occur in the morning, before beginning my work day. Rarely do I ever spend any more time with "news" after this. And if I do, it'd be during my lunch break or after I'm done for the day. Emphasis on "rarely."
During my work time, therefore, I never - as in never - waste any time on "the news." (To a great degree, this includes my professional sources. Much of what is spit out is not much better or more informative that the general news.)
Frankly, I don't understand why any of us who've had a similar experience with "the news" would waste a minute of our precious working hours on it. And if you - for some reason - have not discovered that what we covered here today is simply the way things are, maybe give it some consideration.
Oh, and with a few exceptions I can count on the fingers of one hand, I've not missed out on any truly important news in all the time I've trimmed my time with "the news."
We adore Thee O Christ and we bless Thee
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