Americans Do Not Deserve the News

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By Deborah Emin (about the author) Page 1 of 1 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Deborah Emin - Writer

Until we can grow up and take some responsibility for what is hurled at us from the likes of most news networks, we do not deserve any news. Rather we should be engaged in a debate about how to grow up and deal with the real news that is sitting in front of us and that we choose to ignore. It is like a parent taking a child in hand and saying until you can handle what is going on right in your room, I will not allow you to know what is going on in the rest of the world.

For starters, these parents will say to us, you have to turn off all radios, tvs, and internet connections. You are obviously incapable of understanding what is being done to you, what is being thrown your way and you have not one neuron in your brain that can distinguish news from entertainment. Thus, these hypothetical parents say, you need to learn what you can do and must do in order to change how this horrible assault occurs and what steps you can take to alter it.

While we, the children, hurl back at them that we know once the news media are made non-profit they will be more accountable and so just leave us alone. The parental types know we are living in a fantasy world when we throw that type of comeback at them. In another effort to have the parents show some leniency we cry, please, please, let me continue to listen to the news, read the news, play with the news. I have been so good and been voting of late. I cast a vote or two.

Yes, yes, say the parents who seem to be listening to us but then they pull the plug. Pointedly they say to us, all these doses of Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter are not going to provide you with a comfortable relationship with the truth. They are giving you entertainment and gladiator sports, not news. You do not need to hear hate spewed over the airwaves. And by the way, we all own those airwaves. You need to learn how to make saner choices about who you listen to and how you let them talk to you.

But we, the children, say, you are being partisan. You are letting the “liberal” media have their say and not those on the other side.

And then the adult parents chuckle among themselves and face the difficult reality of explaining to their young and naive children that there is a) no liberal media and b) that the problem with letting anyone who can scream and yell about how correct their views are without ever allowing anyone else to say they are wrong, well, children, do you see where this approach to the “news” will lead us?

As the adults see it, the news has disappeared from all media. They are aware of what has happened and how it has happened but no one really wants to listen to these adults. It is always more fun to be entertained than it is to think. The adults know too how this has happened but they wonder if just sending the children to their rooms and turning off the tv will solve this problem. They meet to seek a way to avoid the catastrophes so clearly on the horizon because they truly care about us even when we misbehave.

www.deborahemin.com

Deborah Emin is the founder of the publishing company, Sullivan Street Press. She is also the impressario of the Itinerant Book Show as well as the program director of the REZ Reading Series in Kew Gardens, NY. Her novel, Scags at 7, is back in (more...)

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