Online News Services

Lately I have taken to getting my news first from the BBC News Service and only later and not nearly as enthusiastically from the former main source, Google News. This is because I came to see BBC as being much better for a person's mental health, or at least mine.

This is partly because the British are known for harboring large numbers of eccentrics, and in that kind of setting I would fit in comfortably, being a known eccentric myself, though, maybe paradoxically, I have seldom wanted to go to the U.K. for any kind of a visit, much less to live there. Among other difficulties that I would expect to face would be a big language problem. That is, if modern English movies -- and don't even mention the Scottish ones -- are any indication. I miss at least half the lines in those films all the time, and the actors rarely seem to be interested in conveying the idea that clearly spoken standard English is still used in those Isles ...if it ever was.

Another reason that BBC News is better than Google News is because it gives a much wider view of world happenings, along with the touches of the bizarre and the whimsical liberally sprinkled over everything. Google News, on the other hand, is bad for the spirit because its system for choosing news items seems committed to the idea that only what is happening in the U.S. is important. But even worse, there's a clear tendency in Google News to cast the pre-Fascist elements in American life, especially in politics, in the best and most hopeful light and the Democrats and especially President Obama in the worst.. How else to explain why the toxic rants of the supposedly former VP, D. Cheney, are regularly presented as if he was still calling the shots from the vantage point of the White House where he and his figurehead buddy held a badly befuddled American public hostage for eight long and painful years.

Just yesterday Google News carried an item declaring a face-off between Cheney and J. Biden, because they were appearing, separately, on competing news discussion shows on the same day, and the implication was that they had exactly the same status, though Cheney was, thankfully though who knows for how long (the GWBush vigil wasn't the first time that he had occupied a big chair in the U.S. Government), deposed from that office well over a year ago, while Biden is currently holding that position as the American Veep and doing it with more integrity and good will than Cheney was ever capable of summoning.

But I shouldn't object to this too much, should I? Because it just shows all over again and for the umpteenth time that the country is permanently segmented into two parts -- the decent, charitable, and well-mannered one that recently managed to allow B. Obama and J. Biden to take a turn in the Oval Office, and the pugnacious, uncharitable, and ugly part whose heroes are still badly distorted beings striped like the Cheney bird.