October 2, 2006 07:35 AM
Are We Media-Numb?
About two weeks ago, my teenage daughter, her boyfriend, and I went out to lunch to my daughter's favorite restaurant. We promptly ordered our favorite appetizer: spinach and artichoke dip. But the waiter informed us that the restaurant was currently not serving this dish, or any other containing spinach, due to the E-coli-infected spinach that has been found in 26 states across the U.S., and has already killed one person and made 187 others sick.
I'd heard about the whole spinach E-coli scare, of course, because like a good little citizen, I try to read the newspaper, scan news items on the Internet, and watch a television news broadcast at least a few times a week. But I started thinking about how although I knew eating spinach was not the greatest idea, I ordered it anyway. And I decided that I do not have a death wish, I'm just one of the many Americans who gets so much news on a daily basis that not all of it sticks. To be perfectly honest, I began to wonder if the amount of media I am exposed to has made me a bit numb.
I feel particularly strange about this revelation because I am, by trade and by education, a journalist. Although I ditched news journalism for the fluffier, much-more-fun lifestyle stuff more than a decade ago, I do remember my hard news days well, covering the city and police beat in a South Florida town, spending my days staying on top of whatever news the residents of my community needed to know. When I was an eager journalism student, I could not imagine a time when important news stories would just float through me, when much of the news would have little-to-no affect on my day-to-day life. I never imagined that there would be a day when I would hear about deaths and armed robberies and even war without so much as looking up from the dinner I was cooking at the time. But that day has come.
Has the news become just another backdrop of our lives, like the music being emitted from our iPods? I'd like to think that isn't the case. Perhaps as I get older, my brain is just a little lower on bandwidth. Whatever the case may be, I'm just glad that alert waiters and the CDC are looking out for me. Every little bit helps.
