'You're Too Invested in the News'
‘You’re too invested in the news’. This is something I hear a lot. I hear it from my friends at catch-ups scheduled between current affairs podcasts and Newsnight episodes; from my family as I record yet another documentary on Iraq and, most frequently, from boys I have known for weeks at most who argue that I am way too ‘argumentative’ about things I ‘shouldn’t care about’.
Is there something more than an unconsciously self-superior world-view, deep-seated in every human mind, behind these words? Is it that when some boy asks me how my day was, he really doesn’t want to know about the report I saw from Hong Kong and why I am still reeling hours later, or is being a woman passionate about something he has never tried to understand a genuine turn-off?
Experience, and maybe scepticism, pushes me to the latter. Hours of arguing against mansplaining with genuine facts ended suddenly with the infamous ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re like this’ and thus, another failed talking stage. This has become a pattern.
I suppose this frustration comes from a lifetime of being labelled simply as ‘obsessive’. Looking back on me as a child, that was probably a fair judgement. My parents will recount fondly the ‘phase’ in which I reread the entire Harry Potter series every summer for six years straight, or the time I discovered my new favourite band half an album in and then went on to see them five times in two years.
Obsession and passion, however, are two very different things.
My parents will also remember how straight from school I would rush up to my bedroom, sit cross legged in front of my first ever TV and watch, exhilarated, the 10 minute Newsround bulletin every single day without fail. The day I got my first tablet meant an entire world of exciting CBBC content was suddenly available to me on BBC IPlayer and, probably to the delight of my parents, I was rarely seen outside my bedroom and instead could be found watching episode after episode of that much-loved children’s’ news programme. Sat there on my bedroom floor, innocently ignorant and eight years old, is where this passion for all things journalism was born. I didn’t know it then but five years down the line that passion would be a burning one and would soon become a dream job.
Being constantly aware of what is going on in the world that I live in has always been a quintessential part of my life since that day. It has always been a part of my personality. When I read an article, or when I watch a televised report I am immediately thrust into someone else’s shoes, someone else’s life and experiences and I want to learn more.
That said, I am well aware of the effects too much bad news can have on someone and my friends will catch me debating both the ethics of war and celebrating the knighting of Sir Tom Moore all in one afternoon.
So, it is not concern that prompts these boys to tell me that I am way ‘too invested’ in the news. It is not with veneration that they say ‘That’s a big word’. They are not simply curious when they ask if I have anything better to do with my time. To them, their lives are for trinket women. Small and silent.
They forget that Helen was half-god before the face that launched a thousand ships.
Time and time again I find myself pushing people out of my life before they can even start to plan a first date all because they’re programmed to belittle anything and everything a girl is interested in. But, they can tell me no-one will take me seriously in a dress, that I don’t look like someone who is interested in politics, that I am ‘cute’ when I am clever and I will still keep the fire burning eternally. No-one can put it out but me.
The dismissiveness of this question is no accident, their words are crafted to trivialise anything and everything.
‘The News’ to them is some unimportant thing, as if it does not define everything in the world around us.
It is such a lazy term for the stories of the world, the tales of our lives and the events of history in the making. I have not grown up watching and reading the news to deliver pretentious monologues on the Cabinet. No, journalism is the beating heart of society. In the broad sense of the world, it is all about people. It is the core of humanity just as the eyes are the window to the soul. Every story is someone’s life, someone’s feelings or dreams or reality.
In the front page of one of my many old notebooks reads a quote by American journalist Henry Luce: ‘I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world’. I don’t remember why or when I wrote that down but I do know I share his sentiment. To come close to the heart of the world is to come close to people. All kinds of people. People unlike yourself.
So, when I am told I am thoroughly engrossed in the news and so involved with other people, I ask 'Why wouldn’t you want to be?’.
