Pajamas W’s comment yesterday coincides with a little poll on my DJ intranet homepage, asking where people get their news. The possible choices are TV, radio, internet, mobile device and word of mouth. (Word of mouth?) What’s wrong with this picture?
When it comes to debate, I consider New York Times absolutely essential for the daily intake of information one needs as a general starting point for any specific research when a topic is released. Better to have been following the subject of drones for years, for instance, rather than starting from scratch a month before your first round on the subject and not knowing whether they’re the size of shoe boxes or 737s. It’s like playing a musical instrument: you practice all the time so that you when you perform you internalize the mechanics and concentrate on the music. Or you can use the analogy of sports drills, if you prefer. I tell the Sailors that if they don’t read the paper every day they might as well accept that they’ll always lose to debaters who do, just like the pianists who practice all the time play better than the ones who haven’t touched a keyboard since their last concert. If that isn’t a fact of life in high level PF, I don’t know what is. (In LD, where avoiding the resolution is highly regarded in some circles, it may not quite be so true anymore, but building a well-rounded individual is one of the goals of debate coaching, so I apply it to all.)
I have to admit that I have updated my talk about how to read the newspaper and offer a digital as well as an analog approach. I’ll be honest: when I read the Times on my iPad I do tend to read a little more thoroughly than when I do when I read the physical paper. (I don’t like the Times app, and just use the website version of the day’s paper.) I used to think that the serendipity of news intake required the paper version, but I don’t believe that anymore. While the lack of photos might keep me from looking at something fanciful, the full reading of all the headlines is easier on the tablet. Overall the difference when I finished is marginal, but my real point is that there’s nothing wrong with the digital experience, if one prefers. The serendipity of news, the opening of one’s mind to whatever is offered and attempting to take it all in before filtering down to the articles of interest is there either way.
The point of doing the Times is that one sits down and spends some time doing the news, however one does it. I’m sure that most people do not get their news via newspaper these days (although it not even being a possibility in the DJ poll is ludicrous), but spending some time getting news in some depth is important. Listening to NPR news is a great thing to do, but it takes way more time that I don’t see most students having. Our bus drivers do not play “All Things Considered” on the way to school, more’s the pity. We have a local channel, fifty bazillion watts strong, that is the default, playing that stuff people refer to as “pop,” which is a substitute for music much like artificial sweeteners are a substitute for sugar. If our drivers play anything, they play that, a station where ear worms live forever. So although I recommend NPR news radio, I don’t expect too many people actually get the opportunity to listen to it.
Once upon a time, most people got their news from the hourly one-minute news updates between shows on primetime television. That is a fact. It’s also, at most, two minutes of news. In an internet world, of course, news is redefined insofar as it’s not what happened anymore but, to a great extent, what’s happening. The immediacy is the internet’s great strength: who didn’t follow the Boston bombings on Twitter? The idea that you don’t get news until the next morning, you read it, and no more news happens until the morning after this one, is outdated. But the idea that you spend some time going over the events of the day (and associated commentary) is not outdated. So it’s not a question of getting the news per se as much as devoting time to doing so. I am going to set aside this much of my day to a private briefing on current events, so to speak. There are a few good ways to do this, but not doing it is a recipe for ignorance. Which is why, I guess, so many Americans are ignorant. Not dumb. No, not dumb, just empty-headed. No matter how smart you are, if you don’t put stuff in your head, your head is going to be empty. And if your head is empty, you will indeed act in an empty-headed manner.
Oh, well. I will continue to lecture Sailors every year on why they need the news and a few good ways to get it, and I will point out the themes of each day of the week that inform feature coverage (like tech on Thursday and media on Monday in the Times business sections), and I will repeat my standing offer of financial reward to anyone who can beat me at the crossword or even complete one. Whether or not it takes will, as always, depend.
(You know what really shocked me recently? Not only don’t kids read the papers, they don’t even read what I have always referred to as the funnies. They don’t read the comics! What’s wrong with these kids nowadays? My lawn gets busier every day.)
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