and now, the news
Oct. 10th, 2009 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacYesterday the Innerwebs were full of nothing so much as Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the reactions thereto, and how "He got it for not being Bush" was such a tired old line within two hours of the announcement being made.
But how did it affect the print newspapers?
The news came out just too late to make our Friday morning paper. Today, Saturday, the news story is buried on page three under the dull and uninformative headline, "Peace prize lauds change in U.S. policy," next to other stories with the equally dull headlines "President calls for consumer protection" and "Troop levels in Afghanistan still undecided." I can hardly bring myself to bother to read these, and begin to wonder how the President can do his job without expiring of sheer ennui. How about if he decided to act like a Nobel Peace laureate, and took action which would result in a headline of "Troop levels in Afghanistan reduced to zero"? I'd read that. Even "President calls for 'caveat emptor' consumer policy" would at least be interesting.
The main story on the front page discusses the continued gridlock in state government - no news there - but one of the smaller of the feature stories occupying the rest of the page does concern the reaction to the prize, and is given the even duller and more generic headline, "Benefit or burden for Obama?" This is so dull I didn't even notice the story was there the first two times I glanced over the front page.
In other words, had my computer or internet connection been down, or had I been too busy yesterday to go online - which I almost was, having been out most of the day - and had I not been looking for it in today's paper, I might still not even know about the peace prize. The moral of this story is, that if I want to know what's going on in the world, I either have to scour the newspapers with toothpicks holding my eyelids open, or sit at the computer all day.
I was out of the country and not attending to news sources during Katrina. Several days later I arrived at a hotel with a television on and saw footage of water in the New Orleans streets. "What happened?" I asked. "Did the big hurricane they've always feared hit?"
But how did it affect the print newspapers?
The news came out just too late to make our Friday morning paper. Today, Saturday, the news story is buried on page three under the dull and uninformative headline, "Peace prize lauds change in U.S. policy," next to other stories with the equally dull headlines "President calls for consumer protection" and "Troop levels in Afghanistan still undecided." I can hardly bring myself to bother to read these, and begin to wonder how the President can do his job without expiring of sheer ennui. How about if he decided to act like a Nobel Peace laureate, and took action which would result in a headline of "Troop levels in Afghanistan reduced to zero"? I'd read that. Even "President calls for 'caveat emptor' consumer policy" would at least be interesting.
The main story on the front page discusses the continued gridlock in state government - no news there - but one of the smaller of the feature stories occupying the rest of the page does concern the reaction to the prize, and is given the even duller and more generic headline, "Benefit or burden for Obama?" This is so dull I didn't even notice the story was there the first two times I glanced over the front page.
In other words, had my computer or internet connection been down, or had I been too busy yesterday to go online - which I almost was, having been out most of the day - and had I not been looking for it in today's paper, I might still not even know about the peace prize. The moral of this story is, that if I want to know what's going on in the world, I either have to scour the newspapers with toothpicks holding my eyelids open, or sit at the computer all day.
I was out of the country and not attending to news sources during Katrina. Several days later I arrived at a hotel with a television on and saw footage of water in the New Orleans streets. "What happened?" I asked. "Did the big hurricane they've always feared hit?"
