The news has become our master, not our servant

I saw an odd thing this morning: A man on an apartment balcony, not a few feet from where I was standing, was listening to the news on the radio.

By listening, I mean that he was listening purposefully, not passively. At 7 a.m., he switched the set on. For seven minutes he was hooked. And then, upon the show’s conclusion, he immediately switched it off. He listened to the news the old-fashioned way.

Few of us do this anymore — at least, few within my orbit. Today, the news is constant and ubiquitous. Walk through an airport and you’ll see CNN every 25 feet. Fire up any website and the snippets come marching your way. In houses around the land, adults use cable to babysit themselves. Are they really watching? Half-watching, maybe. Or perhaps one-third. For the most part it’s background noise, there to be badly remembered; a well-known motif from a poorly known symphony.