terrshee's Diaryland Diary

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Me and the Tower of Babel

I'm at work, and contemplating industrial sabotage. While I recognize that a news room needs access to multiple news sources, I loathe working in the Tower of Babel.

There are three different TV feeds going, none of them doing anything but producing the sound and fury of nattering commentators and/or commercials that repeat with torturous frequency. (I feel particularly betrayed by the Jeffereson Airplane selling a paen counterevolution for a car commercial.)

It is a pity that news has become such a commodity. In my own strange niche of economic data reporting, I can tell how much of importance is out there simply by how much emphasis any given indicator gets. When weekly jobless claims get the headlines, I *know* the is nothing worthwhile to report. Yet the airwaves must be filled, and we must believe that what they are telling us is of prime importance (at least at this instant); forget proportion and balance, we must have content!

Bleh. Anyway, if I knew an undetectable way to make a TV implode, would I be able to resist using it? Even getting the noise level to two feeds might be worth violating my principles. OTOH, if it got me fired, I wouldn't have to listen to this crap day in and day out. But then there's the pesky business of keeping the cat fed and a roof over our heads.

11:59 a.m. - 2004-11-29
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