It wasn't that I pulled down the shutters and kept out all the news while I wasn't here, in fact I did the very opposite. I did keep up with world and U.K. news events, very much so, but through different media outlets to those which are usually cosily familiar and available here at home.
So, it was a great surprise to me therefore, that when back in this sceptred isle, I realised that I was very much uninformed about local U.K. media shattering events. Even more surprising, this knowledge (or lack of it) didn't faze me either. It has got me thinking just how parochial and narrow our U.K.wide news features can be.
It is so easy to amble along with someone else's ideas of what should be fed out to the population at large in the guise of major news. Some items might be news, even sometimes newsworthy, but a lot of what we get is just so channelled, we take our eye off the global picture, our own global picture and the larger one. This is how we become unable to evaluate and balance our views; this is how we can so easily be seduced to become obsessive navel gazers,
Considerations, other than local elections, political party bickerings and media manipulations have come into sharper focus, giving me a fresher and broader perspective to think about. Guess what, now I am back home, I am missing the relatively easy access to the different and broader presentation of news.
