Need to Learninate My Brain

[heidilea]

I've been experiencing some major mental boredom. A week or two ago, I decided to check out a book I read last summer, "Colonial Women, The First Generations," mostly to check one thing I read in there with some other information I had. I said to myself "hey, why not check out some other books about 18th century women!" I found "Women of the House

Comments

[kass_rants]

I'm having a hard time with TV journalists right now, because of their one-sidedness and misinformation.

Sad. The first thing you're supposed to learn in a journalism curriculum is objectivity.

Get your news from BBC.com. It's as close to real news as I have found in English.

[heidilea]

It's funny--I have a journalism degree. They do teach you that; but it seems to have gotten more lax with written journalism (I think they just overwork these people) and is completely non-existant in TV.

I do watch BBC when I can; my stepdad is the news nut in the family; he watches BBC and NJN news, and reads Al-Jazeera so he can see what's really going on in the mid-east.

[kass_rants]

Nowadays it's all about "selling the show" not reporting the news. I never realised it until I spent six weeks in Ireland in 1996. That was long before things became as polarized as they are now. But when I came home, I wondered why CNN was suddenly more like a commercial than a news report.

The BBC isn't perfect, but at least they have a different, non-US bias.

[heidilea]

Like this:

US news: 45 insurgents were killed today, but more on that later, now back to Paris Hilton...

BBC news: 30 women and 15 children were killed today....

I didn't have cable growing up (still don't). I remember watching CNN a few weeks after 9/11 when my sister was in the hospital. I couldn't understand why they had so much stuff packed onto the screen. Or why they weren't really saying anything, just reiterating (sp?) the same information over and over. I can't even watch it at all now; they just sensationalize everything that isn't important.

No wonder the rest of the world hates us.

[carly_beth]

wow you must be bored to be reading text books. i didn't read my o chem book when i had to, lol. and yeah, i never could stand cokie roberts either, even as a journalist. but i think her throttle comment might have been directed at him calling them "your children" instead of "our children". but that was just the way people talked then. i juse witnessed an 80-yr-old woman talking to her 75-yr-old sister, referring to their mother as "my mother". that's just the way people used to talk.

[heidilea]

Actually, with walking on my lunch break, and other such nonsenses like TV and cooking, I haven't started reading it.

And the "throttle" comment was directed at him not giving Abigail a "better" option, in Cokie's 21st century mindset. John Adams trusted his wife completely, and allowed her to make important desicions in a time when a wife had to defer to her husband on everything. Also, there was a war going on, and was Abigail supposed to pack up the kids, abandon the farm, and travel 300+ miles to Philadelphia? No! She, and the kids were better off staying put, than risking travel in this dangerous time.