Challenge: "A Week Without News"

Regular readers (all two of them) of my blogs are more than familiar with my incessant rants on all things mass media. Let's face it -- most news is not news at all and therefore a waste of my time. I'm not out to be Noam Chomsky here, but let's just say we share a common disdain for the Fourth Estate and the crap it continually shovels us.

In honor of going beyond mere rhetoric, I'm issuing a challenge that takes direct action against these purveyors of scare tactics, infotainment, advertorials and mental pornography. I'm designating the fourth week of July to an all-out ban on The Fourth Estate and its many iterations.

Kicking off on Sunday, July 23, "A Week Without News" will be seven days of no mass-market, corporate-sponsored news. No newspapers, no talk radio, no online news sites, no 24-hour cable news networks and certainly no local television news. The idea? To show producers, journalists, media moguls, benefactors and all associated that I've had my limit of unethical reporting, exploitation, profiteering, histrionics, instigation, misguided agendas, agendas period, mindless ranting, editorializing, fiction, friction, armchair experts and every other aspect plaguing what had once been a proud institution.

Full disclosure -- I, myself, spend an inordinate amount of time absorbing this slop. I listen to sports talk radio during my commute. I browse headlines on My Yahoo!, CNN.com, 9news.com and ESPN.com. I pick up the local papers and scan the articles. And every so often I'll watch a few minutes of the 10 o'clock news. I'd like to chalk it all up to research, but let's just say I have a basis for my bias against the media.

Now, I'm issuing this challenge to myself and myself alone. But if you, too, are fed up and ready to demonstrate your frustration, I invite you to join me in this small-scale boycott. We've been told time and time again that this is a consumer-driven economy, yet we so infrequently use that power. This is just one way to show a decaying industry that it's time to change. If you agree, then I urge you to spread the word.

A quick recap:

What: A Week Without News
When: 12:01 a.m. Sunday July 23 to Midnight Saturday July 29
Why: To demonstrate that we don't need or benefit from the overwhelming majority 'news' we're being sold. We want the return of core journalistic ethics and the elimination of packaged, 'productized' news.

Cheers,
Sean Hawk
sean.hawk@gmail.com
http://dailydirge.blogspot.com/

PS I'm not the first person to consider this type of boycott, and I certainly won't be the last. In fact, there were some recent rumblings in the blogosphere to make July 4 the day of boycott. Personally, I can do anything for one day, so that's why I'm pushing it a week. And I'll guarantee you I won't miss anything in that time ... kind of like a soap opera, where you skip a week and don't seem to miss a beat. :)