Perri Nelson's Website 

Blogging and the News

I used to get all of my news from television and the radio. I must admit, I didn't get a whole lot of news that way. I wasn't really that interested. They didn't put much news into the time I did watch anyway.

Watching television news doesn't do much for me. Especially watching network television news. How much hard news can you get from a half-hour long show anyway? Apparently not much, despite the fact that so many people watch it.

Radio news isn't much better. Especially if you're not listening to a news radio station. When I was younger I didn't listen to radio for the news. I listened because I wanted to hear some good old rock and roll! The news was just as irritating to listen to as the commercials. I really liked it when they radio stations would play song after song after song with no commercial interruptions, and without voice-overs from the disk jockeys.

My mother used to listen to talk radio in her car. Bleagh! I mean, stick your finger down my throat! Please! It was all psycho-babble and "self-help" stuff. That wasn't news either.

I wasn't really interested in the news of the day anyway. It was boring. I guess I didn't even start taking an interest in it until I went on a business trip one day to visit a few electronics manufacturing facilities. While I was on that trip I stopped by a colleagues room one morning before we were supposed to head for the airport. He was watching the "Today" show.

It looked like a fun show. It didn't look as boring as the regular news shows. It was also, apparently, the cool thing for an up and coming businessman to watch in the morning. So I started watching it.

I also started taking the newspaper. Neither one of these forays into "the news" lasted long though. I couldn't maintain enough interest in the news to get up early enough to watch the "Today" show every day. Besides, I though Bryant Gumbell was obnoxious and Al Roker's weather reports weren't all that useful, since I lived in Florida and they were generally National weather for places I wasn't going to go to anyway.

The newspapers piled up on my doorstep day by day. Too much to read and not enough time once I finally dragged my butt out of bed and poured some coffee down my throat on my way in to work. Nothing I did related to anything in the news anyway, so I lost interest rather quickly. I dropped my subscriptions after a short while. Getting rid of all that paper was a drag anyway.

I guess all along I was pretty much self-absorbed and not interested in the things that happened in the world around me. I was more interested in my own entertainment and in learning how to write software. Somewhere during that time I was reading a book on software development by one of the "icons" of the trade. In the appendices in the back the author had a few things to say on the ethics of software development, and engineering in general.

I didn't like what he had to say. He came at the topic from an interesting point of view. He appeared to feel that any software engineer or developer that worked on government projects was ultimately working to bring about the end of civilization as we know it. Somehow working on the guidance system for a missile or working on software to support a business that did that was immoral.

The funny thing was, that was what I did for a living. I wrote software for a government contractor. I didn't write guidance system software or anything like that, but I did write software that helped the company to put together reliable cost estimates and proposals for the company so that it could write that kind of stuff. This software development "icon" was telling me that I was making my living off of destruction and that it was immoral.

That was pretty tough to take. What little news I got was also pointing in similar directions. The government was immoral. The military was evil. The man I had voted for for president was going to get us all killed when the Russians couldn't take a joke.

Ultimately I quit working for that company and moved out here to the left coast. That didn't help my political mindset much. I wasn't working for military contractors anymore though. And my exposure to the news was really messing with my head. I guess it didn't help that I got most of my news by this time from David Letterman and Johnny Carson's monologues.

When I started listening to talk radio on the way to work out here, the spreading of "Drive-by wisdom to the masses, one listener at a time" had me pretty much convinced that black was white and right was left. Without realizing it, I was falling for socialism, hook, line, and sinker.

Pretty soon I started reading the news fairly regularly. Mostly on the web. Mostly MSNBC. Why MSNBC? Because I worked at Microsoft, and it was a new venture. Because MSNBC's Redmond operation was in the same building that I worked at. Because I could walk past their offices on my way to my car and read all of the "front page" articles tacked to the walls in the stairwell.

MSNBC soon added features to their site including "bulletin boards" where readers could comment and discuss the topics of the day. I used to frequent the "Technology" bulletin board and argued with a lot of people there about the merits of copyright law, and about the big Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit.

I read all of the trial briefs that Microsoft released on the public relations section of their website. I read the counter briefs. Suddenly, with this big government action that was threatening the company I worked for I became very interested in the news.

It didn't take long before I realized that a lot of the things that the newspapers were telling me were slanted, and usually in ways that although they "felt" right, seemed to be wrong. I started thinking about it all.

Then one day, I was listening to the radio and encountered Rush Limbaugh. I immediately hated him. He's arrogant in ways that I just couldn't believe. He was always talking about how "right" he was. He was always bragging about having half of his brain tied behind his back "just to make it fair". I could only put up with a little of it at a time before I would turn off the radio in disgust.

Pretty soon though I was hooked. It took a while, but I started to see what he was saying. I still don't agree with everything he has to say. I still think he's pretty arrogant at times. But he did make me think even more critically about the things I read.

I stopped listening to the radio for a while and started reading the news online more and more. I found that I really hated CNN. MSNBC was still one of my favorites. Another news source I learned to hate rather quickly was "The Register". Then I started reading the New York Times online.

By the time the 2000 elections came along I had just about had it with Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Bill Clinton's antics had pretty much left me cold. Al Gore's arrogance was over the top. When he claimed to have taken the lead in inventing the Internet I was done with him. I didn't really like any of the Republicans in the race either, but I liked George Bush a whole lot more than John McCain.

Things seemed to be pretty much the same in politics as they had all along. Neither party had much to offer as far as I was concerned. Republicans were for lower taxes. They were for smaller government. Both were things I agreed with. Democrats wanted to solve everything by putting the government in charge of it all.

The thing was, the Democrats of the day couldn't be trusted to do anything right. There was Monica Lewinsky. There was Waco. And Elian Gonzales. If that was what government could "do for us" I didn't want it. So I voted for George W. Bush.

One Tuesday, in early September the next year I was watching MSNBC before heading off to work. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, and looked at the television to see huge plumes of smoke coming from the World Trade Center. While the talking heads were babbling away, I watched a jetliner plow right into the other tower.

The talking heads were just beginning to figure out that the planes had been hijacked. It didn't take me that long to figure out what was going on though. That was more than just a terrorist hijacking. It was an act of war. I said so to my wife.

I remember watching stunned as that plane flew into the tower over and over again, from multiple angles on different news channels. I remember watching with sick horror as people were jumping out of the broken windows on the upper floors, seeking a quick death from the fall rather than a slow agonizing death in the flames.

For the next few days it seemed as if the country pulled together in the face of an attack on our country by a determined enemy. Democrats and Republicans spoke with one voice at ground zero. They spoke with one voice in the halls of Congress. Even the news media seemed to step up in support of our nation.

Then I read an opinion column or two on Townhall.com. I remember reading pundits discussing how great it was that the nation could pull together like this, and how the events of the day made the petty bickering and ideological infighting that so characterized politics just a few days before seem ludicrous. And, I remember one or two of them wondering how long it would be before we started hearing voices of dissent. How long would it be before the "hate America first" crowd started to speak out.

It didn't take long at all. Within just a few days some people in the universities were asking what we did to make them hate us. Within just a few days, there were some saying that we deserved what happened. It took a little longer for it to hit the mainstream news, and the halls of Congress, but it came quickly enough.

September 11, 2001 changed my attitude about the news and politics. I spent a good bit of time thinking about what I believed and what government should be about. I discovered Newsmax. I discovered Fox News. I started reading multiple news sources and comparing what they had to say. I started really listening to talk radio. Someone at work pointed me at Orbusmax.com.

I started reading blogs.

A few people I've talked to or exchanged comments with say they get most of their news from blogs these days. I still get my news from major media sources. I've learned to take what I read with a few shakers of salt though, and to compare multiple news sources before I believe what I read.

Most of what I read on blogs is opinion. It's generally informed opinion, but not all of it is informed. The thing about blogs and pundits is they tell you that you're reading opinion. When you listen to talk radio, you know that what you're hearing is opinion.

Sadly, most of what I read in the news is opinion too. They don't tell you it's opinion though. They label it as "objective reporting". It's still thinly disguised opinion. It's all subjective.

It helps to have a long memory. It also helps to consider where you came from and where you are going. I guess more than anything though, you have to know where you stand and why.

Writing a blog takes a lot of energy and time. It takes a lot of thought. I'm amazed at the number of blogs out there that consistently uncover news that the major media chooses to ignore. I'm amazed at the number of blogs out there that regularly stand up for conservative or liberal values.

I love reading a good blog post. I love it when someone writes something that gives me pause to think.

I wish I had more time to read the news of the day and the opinions people have on what it all means. I wish I had more time to write about it and share my own opinions. But, like I said, it takes a lot of energy and a lot of thought.

I try to read the news on a regular basis now. Sometimes it gets downright depressing though. I read a lot of blogs too. Most of the time it's fun, but sometimes I just can't seem to get into it.

Still, I'm amazed at you all. Technorati has a blurb on their website from someone named Matt. "55 million blogs... some of the have to be good." N.Z. Bear at The Truth Laid Bear has rankings and statistics on over 59,000 blogs. Blogshares indexes 7,144,662 blogs (at the time of this writing). That's a lot of blogs.

On Blogshares you can get a random selection from the millions of blogs fairly easily. I've done this a few hundred times. Every once in a while, my random selection is a still active blog. Most of the time though it's a blog that hasn't been updated in over six months. Some of them haven't seen more than a single post since they were started several years ago.

People go to all of the trouble to set up a blog, post once or twice, and then give it up. I'd guess that about 3/4 of the random blogs I've looked at on Blogshares fall into this category.

That's why I find it amazing that I'm lucky enough to have discovered and gotten the opportunity to read the blogs that I do. Anybody that has the drive to write, and expose their thoughts to others on a regular basis amazes me.

These days, I find that worthwhile. A few years ago, and I would have been one of the 3/4s of bloggers that couldn't muster the passion to keep it up.

Trackposted to some of my favorite blogs: 123beta, Woman Honor Thyself, Big Dog's Weblog, basil's blog, Blue Star Chronicles, Leaning Straight Up, The Bullwinkle Blog, and Dumb Ox Daily News, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Trackback URI for this post: http://perrinelson.com/track.aspx?postid=492
Permalink URI for this post: http://perrinelson.com/2007/2/26/492.aspx

123beta trackbacked with "Open Trackback Weekend #42"

Alright, it's the weekend once again... And I have to work. Ugh.

Butch responded with:

I'm with ya on this!