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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

C-SPAN, the original reality TV network

I had to work from home today but one of the advantages to that is I can have the TV on in the background and listen to the news without clogging my bandwidth. I used to watch a lot of CNN and it still tends to be one of the first sites I go to when something goes down but more and more it's becoming unwatchable.

Occasionally I head over to Fox News to see how the world looks from a broken, backwards mirror smeared with grease (I listen to conservative radio on my drive in to work too). But even with my have-an-open-mind-and swap-perspectives cap on I find myself turning away. Then it happened. Like when you suddenly notice the quite geeky girl in the corner is actually kind of cute. I watched C-SPAN.

For those who don't know, C-SPAN is basically a security camera mounted on the wall at all sorts of different meetings, hearings, legislative sessions an...d...zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But to be honest, it's really refreshing to hear words come straight out of a politician's mouth without it being a sound bite or having some lunatic gaffawing at it. Plus it's completely in context. I even enjoy the odd/uncomfortably long pauses between speakers and how they all call each other "friends". They almost seem human. I especially liked when an expert on terrorism was talking about how to identify and deal with extremist groups in the states and in the background there was some guy who was clearly sent a link to a video of someone barfing on a poodle or something and was giggling.

In this light, government definitely isn't sexy or even divisive. It's just really, really deliberate and process driven and it's full of moments at work that a lot of us probably experience. Like that 2 o'clock felling. No wonder we see so many politicians nodding off during these sessions. And they have great caller feedback.

So, C-SPAN, welcome to my news feed. I look forward to many hours of unbiased inform...a..zzzzzzzzzzz.

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