If it wasn’t for the story about skinny-leg jeans being a threat to humankind this past week, I might not have voyaged into the world of news.
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Many are the evenings I have failed to achieve sleep, worried about the threat of skinny-leg jeans and what this might mean for future generations of Kardashians.
Will there be a glut of skinny-legs being pumped out of Bangladeshi factories? Or will the impoverished workers be able to be up-skilled to produce fat-leg jeans in time to save the day? Gawd.
For the rest of it, I fear the world has gone utterly mad and has decided that the only thing better than a pointless argument is an argument about whether the argument is pointless... or, if it’s really the fault of Abbott/Shorten/Obama/the Greeks/climate change.
It seems Western humans have only three or four real news stories a year and they fill in the time raging, ranting, pointing fingers and ducking for cover.
I cannot remember the last time I turned on the telly, watched something and thought: well, that was interesting and previously unknown.
(No, I lie. The truly magnificent SBS TV series Vikings has had me enthralled for a few weeks each year for the past three years. Even more so when I found out it was loosely based on history and helped explain things such as the existence of Normandy, William The Conqueror and Antiques Roadshow expert Lars Tharp. Or why one of our corgis is nick-named Marley Ragnar Long-Dog. But that’s another story... or not.)
I did see one story this past week which made me think there was at least one other frustrated TV junkie in Victoria. It was someone complaining that the tsunami of “reality” TV shows using up every available electron in our TV sets was killing off acting jobs. Put simply, no one was making programs which involved acting – at least, not in a professional sense. There’s always soccer.
Clearly however, there wasn’t enough wriggle room in this story to develop a genuine multi-platform national argument (Oh, yes there is. Oh, no there isn’t). The article sat on the news website for about 56 minutes before it was replaced with a juicy Kanye/Kardashian latest.
My first job in news was in 1972. For the next couple of decades, I had the delusional view that news was about something that happened.
Now, our major national and world news is about what someone thought might have happened or who should have stopped it potentially happening, how do I feel, can I insert the name of the person I dislike the most, and whether it’s fattening. And was she wearing clothes at the time.
Even skinny-leg jeans.