Bizarre news experience

[steuard]

We have a moment of calm right now (but not long enough for a nap), so I wanted to record a rather remarkable news experience that I had Tuesday night and Wednesday morning before other events completely drive it from my mind.

I think of myself as someone who follows the news reasonably closely. (Too closely, really: it's not as if a decent knowledge of world events gains me much in life. But as vices go, it's not too bad.) Most of that comes from skimming through New York Times headlines regularly and reading articles that catch my eye, plus reading a smattering of articles from technology news sites and watching the Daily Show online.

I mention this because while Kim was in labor earlier this week, I occasionally went down the hall to refill our water, and almost all of them seemed to be about the same thing: it sounded like there had just been a verdict in some sort of highly publicized trial. While waiting to be called into the operating room the next morning, the waiting room TV was tuned to a morning news show that focused entirely on reactions to the same court case.

I had never, ever heard anything about this before.

Apparently, there has been this mass cultural event that has transfixed the nation, so much so that one morning news show reporter commented that she'd been covering twists and turns of the trial almost every day for months. How in the world was it possible that no whisper of it had ever caught my attention? I felt a great deal as if I'd walked into a room in late 1994 and asked, "OJ who?" I don't have the impression that I missed much (why exactly was what sounds like a sad local story national news?), but I'm still a bit uncomfortable that I didn't even know I was missing it. Does this news filter of mine only exclude unimportant major stories (yay!), or do I miss big things at random?

Ok. Time to check a diaper.

Comments

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

If this is the one i'm thinking of i've been seeing it for weeks under the "U.S." tab of the news app for my phone, but haven't actually read any of the articles and haven't seen anything about it anywhere else. That may be because my only other regular sources for "normal" news are the sidebar on wikipedia and the Daily Show and Colbert Show, and i'm way behind on that.

Having not read anything about it i can't say why it's gotten so much coverage.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

I missed it too.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Missed it too.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I was peripherally aware, but it didn't sound like learning more would improve my life, so I didn't.

[kirin]

Heard of it only after the verdict, then looked it up briefly and started ignoring it again. Looks like the sort of thing that occasionally catches fire due to a sensationalist hook and random chance of the "news" cycle.

Of course, I get most of my news from social networking and two-week-old Economists, so.

[beth_leonard]

You're not the only one. Missed it here too until after it was over.

When Peter was born, I completely missed the Tsunami until he was about 2 weeks old.

--Beth