The twenty-four hour news cycle has been blamed for promoting worthless, mundane nonstories as earth-shattering “Breaking News.” With so much time to fill, networks allow windy anchors to blather on about nothing; much like a blog, I guess. But the twenty-four hour broadcast day also allows networks to bury stories. Many important bits of news are lost in the barrage of vacuous coverage.
Even with the thousands of bloggers and news sites out there, many stories are simply missed or intentionally overlooked. I think there are more worthy stories than there are people and resources to disseminate the news. What we need are Robojournalists, News Drones, that can fly about recording human experience and uploading it to the web. Surely, the technology is capable. If the US war machine can pick a target in a desert, fly with a remotely controlled device, and sometimes even destroy the intended target (with a few weddings, nurseries, and picnics mistakenly bombed), certainly they can build News Drones to document every facet of humanity.
For more on remote warfare, check out Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It was prescient.
“Poetry is news that stays news,” Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading.
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