No Time for News
We knew the day was coming. We knew it would be a big day for the media. It was Brett Favre's retirement. And with all of the Packer fans in Wisconsin who believe that they are the number one Packer fan, I did expect this to be a big story. We knew it would even be the lead story. But I did not expected to be the only story available on television's local news. I did not expected to be the only story on television's local news for multiple days.
The wall-to-wall coverage was entirely fortuitous. The rerunning and rerunning of press conferences, player reaction, and the lack of further development was ridiculous. The entire story was summed up in three words-Brett Favre retires. The TV news channels made a conscious decision to avoid all other news. This is another blatant display of how TV news views its audience of having absolutely no memories. They thought we forgot that we are in the middle of a presidential election. They thought we forgot that there is economic news that the Federal Reserve was taking actions that is going to impact taxpayers and homeowners across the country. They thought we forgot that there was the possibility of terrorist activity in New York City. Instead we had hour upon hour of standing in front of a convenience store in Mississippi asking anybody who comes out with a six pack in their hand if they have any insight to what Brett Favre is thinking.
While everyone was crying boo-hoo into their beers there could've been stories of people jumping off of bridges, slitting their wrists, or holing themselves up in their homes waiting for further development. But instead there were hours upon hours of coverage warning people not to buy the wrong #4 jersey. There was hour upon hour of running the same clips of old Packer games. There were no new developments to be had.
Well the sun came up in the East and still set in the West. We will go on. We may even continue to look to television to give us some new is of what is going on in the world each day. Life-changing events occur for all of us. Sometimes it seems like everybody cares, and sometimes it seems like nobody cares. Football is only a game. And whatever happens in football, the people who are responsible for reporting our news to us should not encourage us to crawl into a dark corner, our head in our hands and let the rest of the world go by.
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