Odc. 64 - Take a break from the news!

What about weather reports? Well, unless you're a farmer, they're completely subjective. Our social studies professors liked to stress the importance of watching the news. Yours might have said something similar to what mine uttered. Watching the news is like living through historical events or something along these lines. How informed do we need to be really? How deep and meaningful is our historical experience while watching the news? Let's take the Second World War for example. It's probably the most well-documented event in our history.

News outlets like to present any event as personal and life-changing. Again, it increases the ratings, that's how they make money, mostly. How much information we digest is that important in reality? Over the last month I conducted an experiment. I decided to skip reading, watching or listening to the news for the next 30 days or so. I made two exceptions to my no news rule, just so people around me don't take me for a lunatic. Rule number one. Second hand news are fine. Second hand information is information you get from a source different than the original, which makes it less reliable.

Political situation also remains mostly unchanged. Both sides of political spectrum still jump at each other's throats at any occasion. No change is there. The right wing hates the left wing and both hate people who choose not to side with one or the other. All armed conflicts in the world are still ongoing and unresolved. Rarely do wars end in 30 days. In sports news Iga Świątek is still on a winning streak, which also means that everyone is a tennis fanboy these days. News second hand are just as biased as regular news.

You can hear the same news from two different people and you would get something which sounds like two different stories. Also known as a spin, if I remember correctly from my internship at the local TV station. With that in mind, getting news second hand gives you an incentive to do diligent research on a particular topic, which I started doing more often after the experiment, and make up your own mind about what you hear. However, it takes a lot of time to educate yourself sufficiently on the topics covered by the news, so you need to pick and choose.

Dzieci są świetne na jedną rzecz, nauczanie się angielskiego. There's a reason why such a pronunciation is called BBC English. If you want to practice, the best way is to mock anchors. Repeat what they say in a ridiculously pronounced fashion. That's how I did it. Let's try it together. A radioactive capsule was found on the side of a road in Australia. Secondly, it's a good opportunity to practice passive voice, as most news are presented using it. To give you a brief rundown, the subject trades places with the object and the main verb is preceded by B in a particular tense.