A walk down memory lane takes me to the sound of a New York City paperboy calling out the words “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” It takes me to Peter Jennings signing off of ABC World News Tonight, and even the stories my roommate told me my freshman year in Estill hall about “the Slime in the Ice Machine!”
Monotone voices, statistics and numbers are easy incentives to turn the page and flip the channel at 5 o’clock. Newstands are but mere shadows of the times when children would beg their mothers for a quarter, just so they could open the machine.
Call it economic fatigue or call it boredom, but the generation of today appears less and less interested in the news. It is a sad fact.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard the suprised expression from one of my peers exclaiming “the news?” in disbelief, well, you know the expression. I find irony in the appalled for my interests in matters such as the economy and politics, and how it plays a role in my life. That is mainly because I find it hard to understand how celebrity influence has the capability of intriguing readers beyond the realities of the world, but nonetheless that is just the way things are. I am begging for a clue. I am begging for a change in the status quo.
News is more than air time and print, it is truth, it is awareness. It is the witness of promises to be kept, crimes to be acknowledged, and wrongs to be amended. More then just gossip, news is also the source of hope in the features of good happenings to good people.
December 2007 marked the official beginning of a new recession, but I have the feeling someone flipped the channel, someone turned the page, because they are tired of hearing about the economy, tired of hearing the news, and tired of listening to the voice of the people.