A Week Without News -- Day Five

Day Five is just beginning, and I think I might have violated the terms of my campaign. While waiting for my breakfast burrito at the Black Cow, I picked up a copy of Westword and started thumbing through it. Again, this is part of a routine of mine, so it was a fairly unconscious act. I ended up reading a few paragraphs of a story about a group of individuals who fix bikes at no charge (a community service of sorts).

While I only scratched the surface of the article, I think one could make a case that what I was reading was a form of news. No, Westword is not the evil villain I had in mind when I started this whole thing, but this actually brings up an issue I considered from the beginning -- "Where do you draw the line? What constitutes mainstream media? What's safe and what's not?"

There's a lot of gray area there, so my intention had been to avoid EVERYTHING (with the exception of the tech e-newsletters I need to read for my job). Thus far, I've not read a single story from My Yahoo!, CNN, ESPN or 9News. I haven't listened to even a second of radio, or watched so much as a glimpse of TV news. With the exception of catching a Denver Post headline, I haven't had so much as an ounce of newspaper ink on my hands ... until I picked up Westword today.

I won't beat myself up about it, because in all honesty I don't feel it violates the parameters I set forth from the beginning. Just the same, it serves as yet another reminder that news is everywhere, and trying to avoid it in your typical American city is next-to impossible.

Perhaps one of the primary outcomes of this whole thing is not so much the complete abandonment of news, but rather teaching us to better distinguish between the crap and the stuff that's actually worthwhile. We vote with our dollars and our eyeballs, people. And at the risk of sounding like a rallying cry, we have the power to vote the infidels off the island!