Virtues of Slow News

Our new life in Rome has brought many changes to our daily routine. For example, we have wine with meals, and at least two espresso coffee drinks a day (both of which a recent study says may contribute to living past the age of 90 by the way). But one habit has remained: watching the PBS Newshour.

Except now we watch it a day late. Avoiding real time network news means we have a bit more control over how we are affected by news, and for both of us this has been a good thing.

As educators, nothing gets us more upset than news of gun violence in schools, so when I first learned of the news from Florida about the dead and injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14^th, I shielded us from the first two days of television news coverage, reading only Reuters headlines and a few links on my Twitter feed. The sheer number of school shootings in the United States is incomprehensible, and like a grisly symptom of an incurable disease, the nation scrolls through the familiar details, resigned to an accepted truth that killers are armed and will go after the vulnerable and nothing will change. Two days later we watched the PBS Newshour tribute to those lives cut short in Parkland  and began to follow the responses of students from the school. In conversations over lunch, we cried, we processed our fear and grief for our country and our friends and family still living there, and we tried to believe that maybe this time there were good reasons to be hopeful. Emma Gonzalez’s speech, which you can watch in its entirety instead of the clips usually shown on the news, felt epic and historic, so it was amazing to watch the plans for the March 24^th protests and school walkouts unfold, the steam build up on social media, the corporations dumping their NRA connections, the shift in some political rhetoric, all due to pressure generated by the impassioned words of teenage survivors of this horror.

Yet beyond the benefits of a delayed filter on tragic news, watching the PBS Newshour lately has been inspiring for the news coverage not likely to turn up elsewhere. For example, take ten minutes to watch this incredible piece of reporting on the weekend Newshour about East Baltimore’s non-profit Turnaround Tuesday helping the formerly incarcerated find gainful employment. Not only was the story uplifting and interesting, I learned about the Economic Hardship Reporting Project founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, which partnered with PBS on the story. Another series on the Newshour that we love are the Brief but Spectacular portraits. My friend (and in my humble opinion national treasure) Bill Bowers was featured last year, and recently we discovered singer ZeshanB and his fabulous unique music.

The in-depth analysis and commentators on the Newshour help us to better understand the latest complex developments in Russian interference in the 2016 election and growing numbers of indictments. We can’t help but wonder what newsworthy means anymore when

George Lakoff's brilliant analysis of 45's tweets

45’s late night tweets about Oprah make headlines. Thankfully she knows how to stay away and just simply shared her response on Jimmy Kimmel’s show: “You don’t win by meeting negativity head on.”

There are good reasons to get a laugh from the comedians these days, and with Italy’s farcical election around the corner, here’s John Oliver offering to run for Prime Minister.