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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Richard Lanham and James O'Donnell

the breakfast table
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from: James O'Donnell

Where's the News?

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 12:46 PM ET

Yo, Dick, so where's the news?

I just came back from a conference in Algeria, and I'm still disoriented. It was scary enough because they've had a low-grade civil war for almost a decade, in a lull just now but with regular reports of massacres in the countryside. But it's also a fascinating post-colonial place, Muslim and French at the same time, warmly welcoming to visitors with CNN in all the hotel rooms and pictures of Islamic martyrs on billboards at the entrance to towns. I've never found an American news source that really cared about getting inside that world for me.

So I get up this morning, and I start to trawl the Web: Power to the Web surfer, I say; let's find out what's happening out there. So where do I go? Well, there's a hundred Web sites (start with Yahoo!) that'll give me the same consensus superficial news that the morning TV shows will: Skip that. But if I do that, do I have to become my own news editor? Swoosh past the New York Times, skip over to the Frankfurter Allgemeine, check out Central Europe Review, tune into my newsgroups that have wire service reports from around the world to see what headlines there are from the Middle East, from North Africa, from Indochina (those are the places I have preselected in my newsreader), then maybe slow down with Arts & Letters Daily? I can burn off a cheerful half-hour doing that until the morning e-mail starts to chug in and bring me back down to earth.

So what do I know then? I know more about the stuff a middle-aged prosperous white guy wants to know more about. But how do I find the Sudanese news editor I can trust to shape a portrait of the world for me in the morning? If I found one, he'd probably work for Rupert Murdoch, and I wouldn't be much further ahead. I think I'm back to taking responsibility for my own choices.

So where's the news, Dick? I think maybe you and I should look around a bit this week and see what we can see that nobody told us to look at and see what we can make of it. What's really happening?

the breakfast table
entries
1234567891011121314
from: James O'Donnell

Where's the News?

Posted Monday, April 16, 2001, at 12:46 PM ET
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Richard Lanham spent his active academic career teaching and writing about medieval and Renaissance literature at UCLA, but now spends his retirement fiddling around with electronic text. He is the author of The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. James O'Donnell is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and vice provost of computing. He is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.
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