When I was married to wife 23 she insisted on watching Fox & Friends in the morning. I’ve never really been a political kind of person, I couldn’t see myself signing up for any kind of political party because I can’t vote in the USA but mostly due to the fact that over the years I’ve realized that life isn’t easy and there’s always lots of differing opinions and solutions to issues we face. I guess in the perfect world we’d adapt the best ideas rather than be concerned about which political party was behind the proposition.
The morning ritual of watching Fox & Friends ended after I started to pay attention to the actual content of the “news” show. Little by little I realized that much of the news they presented wasn’t accurate or deep enough for me to form an opinion. There was two events that made me find the courage to tell wife 23 that I didn’t want to watch Fox & Friends any more. One was the Terri Schiavo case where she’d suffered a cardiac arrest which caused massive brain damage and eventually declared to be in a vegetative state. Eight years after the diagnosis her husband Michael petitioned to turn off Terri’s life support but her parents opposed the move.
To watch Fox news you’d think that Terri was up and about doing the Riverdance and completing Monday’s New York Times crossword inside 15 minutes despite the fact that Florida’s best medical experts had declared Terri vegetative.
It must have been a very sad situation for everyone involved and Fox news moving into a parking lot opposite the hospital can’t have helped ease the pain. Eventually the feeding tube was removed and Terri died, a postmortem of her body revealed that her brain had deteriorated and lost a great deal of tissue. However I didn’t learn this from Fox news because they didn’t even have the grace to acknowledge that their so called reporting was wrong let alone apologize to Michael Schiavo, Terri’s parents or indeed their viewers.
The other even was far less emotional but was the straw that broke my back. Fox news was covering some kind of Royal event in England and up pops their Royal Correspondent who is a Royal Family insider and so called expert in all things Royal. I was in total shock as I saw some idiot from England spouting utter nonsense about the Royal family and their private thoughts and fears. This “expert” wasn’t a former member of the BBC or ITV news team, he had the reputation of being an eccentric fool when I was in England and once again this viewpoint was being confirmed as he spouted verbal diarrhea on my TV screen. I would have loved to get the Queen to come out of the palace and confront the charlatan, she’d have no idea who he was but the very idea of him being “close” to the Royal family was preposterous and yet Fox News fell for his bullshit and expected their viewers to do the same.
I turned off the TV and declared that my house would be a Fox News free zone in the mornings, wife 23 was taken aback by my passion, so much so that she let me have my own way for the first time in our relationship.
My beloved librarian, has a fabulous brain with at least 3
degrees from reputable American universities for this to be an indisputable
fact. The librarian subscribes to The New York Times newspaper, The New Yorker
magazine and The National Enquirer. No seriously The National Enquirer is just a
joke. We don’t listen or watch the news in the morning because the librarian
believes in quiet time, initially this was a new concept for me but I’ve become
a great fan of quite time.
For election coverage the librarian has morphed from
watching CNN to MSNBC, in particular Rachel Maddow who like Bill Clinton is a
Rhodes Scholar. The librarian is always interested in the academic achievements
of TV presenters and Rachel excels in this area gaining a Doctor of Philosophy
from Lincoln College, Oxford. While I’ve nothing against Rachel, MSNBC or the
librarian I’m always agitated by anyone who has an opinion and a certain amount
of reluctance to embrace input from other sources and yet I respect someone who
has an opinion. Try living with that contradiction in your life, the phrase
"I used to be undecided but now I'm not so sure" is so appropriate to
my life.I’ve always enjoyed great strategy even though I’m a person that’s been gifted with a fantastic eye for a ball but a small brain that hasn’t been worthy of academic certificates. I just enjoy evaluating both sides of an argument but this prevents me from being able to give 100% commitment to one side or the other.
I can see the Yin and yet also see the Yang and so I remain
firmly non-committal about anything in life apart from having no doubts that I
was born in the best county in England or even the world. That’s my Yorkshireman reality,
Jobsonian
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