On CBC radio news at 11:00 a.m. on September 1, 2024, there were three news items:
- A shooting on West Eglinton Avenue after the close of an after-hours club
- The search for a young person who has been maiming and torturing various animals and pets in the city; and
- A piece on drug overdose deaths in the city and what may happen after the ban on harm reduction centres near schools
That was it. Nothing else; then the weather and back to regular programming.
On the 1:00 p.m. World Report again on CBC radio, it opened with the killing of 6 Israeli hostages, followed by a number of other killings by drone attacks in Russia and the Ukraine, paralyzed children contracting polio, and ending with an item on dying Monarch butterflies.
If you are not suffering trauma and upset before the news, it’s hard not to be suffering afterwards.
It seems that the well-informed citizen of 2024 is someone who knows who is dead, who and what’s dying, what’s on fire, who is fighting whom and what is blowing up. Add to that a decent helping of screwups of various sorts usually perpetrated by governments.
And you can listen on the hour and sometimes on the half hour all through the day to the same items over and again.
On longer segments, we might hear about Parliament or studies or what various groups are doing. But the news is getting shorter and what passes for a newscast now is literally ‘what’s breaking’.
They mean it.
You really have to ask yourself who is in charge and what they could possibly have in mind when almost all the news concerns happenings along a continuum of mayhem and incompetence. And why pick on the CBC? Because it is a Crown Corporation.
On CBC Television, they follow the question of ‘What’s breaking?’ with ‘What’s really going on?’. If you listen closely ‘what’s really going on’ is mayhem and things falling apart. And when there is not quite enough of it, they start reporting on significant anniversaries of death or bungled reports concerning events of the past.
Personally, I have generally stopped listening to all news reports and have stopped watching them on television.
I have substituted this with reading subscription news, mostly columnists, listening to audiobooks and reading actual books. I never listen to news in my car (until driving home on September 1, 2024).
I have little idea of ‘what’s breaking’ or what’s going on but do believe that I am much better informed.
But even if I have a personal solution to the news cycle, the real problem is that some mayhem and screwups are more important than others. The person shot following a bar fight is truly a tragic event. But when it leads the news while deaths due to drug overdoses precedes the weather report, then all mayhem starts to have a certain sameness and ‘what’s really going on’ invites the audience to understand it all as a cacophony of sadness and incompetence.
And is that ‘what’s really going on?’