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| Once upon a time this was news, to someone. |
Do you watch the evening News?
Do you subscribe to and read a daily paper . . . daily? Do you check
out the News on your
smart phone regularly? I mean by going to a News
channel and reading what’s offered.
I’ve
no idea who first called the publicizing of the day’s events, News.
“New” is an adjective, not a
noun. It’s not grammatically eligible for pluralization by adding
an s. If there can be
a day’s News, why
not a day’s bigs, or
smooths, obeses,
wets? The
day’s wets would be
all about events like floods, drinking water boil advisories,
contamination of rivers, rain. It would be about events that are wet,
just like CBC’s The National
is all about things that are happening that weren’t happening
yesterday. Events that are New.
But
then, objecting to the nounification
of an adjective could certainly be taken as a sign of obsessive,
ludditeful Englishteacherism. Humans invented their first words, and
we’re still making new ones. Like prioritize,
which came in to use in my lifetime although priorize
already existed for
use on occasions where rank just
wouldn’t do. So why not orderitize, simplifitize,
managetize?
Just
wait. They’re coming.
But
back to the news.
“Here is the evening news,” the TV announcer intones. Shouldn’t
it be “Here are the
evening news,” now that News is
a plural noun? You don’t say, “Here is
my sister’s twins.” Or do you, and have I been left behind . . .
again?
George
Carlin has noted that there’s really only bad news.
Good news aren’t
news. In one of his
monologues (you can find it on YouTube) he puts into words what all
of us know but aren’t prepared to admit: when we turn on the
news, we want to hear of immense
conflagrations, wars, floods, many people killed. We want to hear
about crime, about powerful people being destroyed, of people we
don’t like being masterfully humiliated by people we do like. As
much as news are
increasingly less able to command our attention, who on earth would
tune in or read the evening paper if all the stories were about
success, achievement and peace?
“An
Air Canada Boeing 747 Saskatoon to Winnipeg flight took off at 7:00
am as scheduled and arrived in Winnipeg without incident an hour and
twenty minutes later. The captain, Arnold Pansyfoot, and his
co-pilot, Diana Gottago reported that the weather was fine and “it
was clear sailing all the way.” Rounding out the crew for this
flight were flight attendants Danielle Perkyhat and Orville
Getarealjob, a native of Edmonton. When interviewed, passenger Jonah
H. Fishbait said: “The peanuts tasted really fresh!”
Good
news just isn’t.
Sorry.
Lately, it seems, the
news have become overburdened
with a need to provide what people want
to hear as opposed to what they ought to
hear. News are paid
for by advertising, mostly, and advertisers want to see large
audiences, and so even the mainstream newspapers
and broadcast media have been leaning toward the most sensational,
bad news. I call it
tabloidifying the news.
(Or should it be tabloidicizing)
“Hey folks! Follow us. We ferret out the worst news our world has
to offer . . . with pictures. Parental Guidance strongly advised.”
Donald Trump is well versed in
two areas: 1. knowing that there’s a huge audience for bad news
and, 2. understanding that the media have an insatiable thirst for
bad stories. They have
to have such a thirst; their very career lives depend on it.
Here are a few news
for Sunday morning: I’m still
in my bathrobe at 8:00 am and, I’ll be going to church later. I’ll
bet you’re hungering to hear that I crashed my car en-route. Well,
maybe not you, but certainly all the news junkies
out there.
If I do, it will be on the
evening news. If I
don’t, it won’t.
