verging_on_random

Cutting the MSM apron strings

Do you occasionally have moments of sudden, brilliant insight? When you’re sober, I mean. Moments when the truth about a previously unexamined part of your life becomes stunningly clear and you see a new future opening up before you?

Well tough luck if you don’t, because I do. I had another one today. This wasn’t quite as life-changing as a few previous ones like the I-should-pack-up-and-leave-Sydney or the I-should accept-that-job moments but in its own modest way it’s overturned a lifetime of custom and practice. You see, I’ve decided to ditch mainstream media.

Let me explain.

Certain habits in my family go back a long way. One is the 7 pm ABC news bulletin. The wireless version was kind of a defining part of the evening in my childhood and I know from family mythology that the practice dates back at least to the Second World War. Once television arrived the nightly ABC News was a seven day a week ritual.

Same with the Fairfax newspapers. The local newsagent delivered the Sydney Morning Herald every morning and dad came home with the Sydney Sun each week night. Once I grew to a man’s estate I did the same, after switching to the Telegraph for a while in a show of youthful rebellion only to be repelled at the rancid populist muck it publishes every day. Lying in bed with the Sun-Herald while the rest of the family went to church was one of the great pleasures of my adolescence.

Since those days in the long distant past, my days have been unconsciously anchored by two things (the Sun vanished many years ago): getting the Herald in the morning and watching the ABC News at night. Oh sure, a few years ago I realised that I had got to page 34 of the Sun Herald before I actually paused to read anything, and vowed never again to buy a Sunday newspaper, but the other six days a week I was hooked. I was so addicted I resented the fact that no newspapers were published on Christmas Day.

Since I became an internet news junkie, however, things have changed. These days I catch up on the news via Google Reader while I shave. I noticed that the nightly ABC News resembled nothing so much as a talking head reading highlights of the first few pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, which in turn did little more than regurgitate stuff I had already read online. Even so, I couldn’t break the habits of a lifetime until today, when one tiny event caused that moment of startling clarity that I mentioned at the beginning.

I went to buy my Herald as usual and was charged $1 over the normal price. Fairfax started this nice little earner a few years ago: they publish all the Saturday classifieds and extra supplements on a Friday before a long weekend and charge Saturday prices; then on Saturday you have to buy the same hefty bundle of crap a second time for the same inflated price. Walking back to my car to get my extra buck I remembered all the times lately I chucked the paper out before I even read it and I kept on walking. And since I have now discarded that part of the day devoted to reading the newspaper it just seems natural to ditch the nightly news as well. If nothing else, it will be good for my blood pressure not to have to watch Our ABC showing endless stories about Alexander Downer and Sophie bleedin’ Scott telling us about the latest medical miracle.

That’s at least an hour a day of my life reclaimed. It’s like the day I realised it was cool to swap my briefs for boxers … I feel so liberated.