Joe Carter asks whether our daily news is making us dumb. For instance, Dan Rather “spent roughly 75,000 hours reporting, researching, or reading about current events,” so why isn’t he considered to be one of the wisest or most knowledgable men in America?
Courage, friends.
Clearly, daily news will not make us wise, but can be very useful. A report I caught by chance (if chance means anything) the other day warned of frost that night, so my wife and I covered up our newly planted herbs, spinach, okra, and tomatoes. Had I not had that news, I would have been very frustrated. I haven’t had much success with our backyard garden over the years, and it’s not supposed to frost after April 15 in the contented pastures neighboring the Chattanooga valley. The news of anticipated frost did not make me wise, and it won’t be relevant to any other day in my entire life, but it was relevant to me on that day.
Of course, how much of what is sold as news is relavent even in this way? Carter closes his piece with this from Muggeridge: “Events that are truly important are rarely those captured on the front page of a daily paper. As Malcolm Muggeridge, himself a journalist, admitted, ‘I’ve often thought that if I’d been a journalist in the Holy Land at the time of our Lord’s ministry, I should have spent my time looking into what was happening in Herod’s court. I’d be wanting to sign Salome for her exclusive memoirs, and finding out what Pilate was up to, and—I would have missed completely the most important event there ever was.’
I haven’t been taking in much news lately, and I can’t see the reason I need to return to it. I’m fairly fed up with my life at the moment. I don’t think the news will help me with that at all.