hi uh um
hi
i i should say something
uh-huh
that i'm the uh least informed this is totally accidental that i have to talk about this topic but it's i'm the least informed person in the whole United States
this has not been determined yet but i i
i've never read a newspaper in my entire life and i've i i never watch TV news nor listen to the news on the radio unless i'm just happening to be listening to music and they slip it on in the car radio before i can turn it off
but
any particular reason
well no i i've i've explored that with lots of people uh they've tried to lock me up and uh things like that but um
um i'm basically not interested and i also find the um everything is so slick and superficial and misguided and misguided and off the um
um
what am i trying to say uh
i do learn about things largely largely from friends and i occasionally will read something like the New York Review Of Books you know someone will write a book about something and then i'll learn all about this thing that was in the news two years earlier
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uh-huh
but it and somehow and anything i participated in or know about when i read about it in the paper is always so
uh covered from such a funny and superficial perspective that i don't have much confidence in it but i mean i don't think it's just that i'm lazy
i really don't i mean i i like to refer to this as sort of Consumer Report phenomenon which is everybody that i know
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reads Consumer Reports so the people who do feel that Consumer Reports does a a wholly inadequate job in their area of particular interest but assume that they do a reasonable job in other areas
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uh without thinking that there were people in who think each other areas area of of specialty and
uh i guess you could explain it two ways and and the cynical view is well these things aren't doing a very good job at all
and the view that i'd rather take is that
uh-huh
there's a different amount of information you need when you're particularly interested in a topic or uh particularly interested in buying something as a you know as a hobbyist versus when you want to go out and buy a blender because you need to mix things
right
yeah
and i think the same thing is true with news if you want to just have an idea as to what's going on most papers and and especially the better papers the the Times the Wall Street Journal the Washington Post give you a reasonable idea
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yeah
if you were deeply involved in it then you immediately realize that what they print is stuff that you probably knew already and the stuff that you want they're not printing because the average person doesn't need or want to know that much
right doesn't want
let me ask by the way just for the record i i'm i totally concede that intelligent people read these things and intelligent people write them
so i mean i'm not being elitist in that sense i hope uh
well i mean there's there's a reasonable question as to
whether it's worth the amount of time it takes to keep up on things
yeah what
and most people think it is and i can i can you know accept that some people think it's not and can find better ways to use it
yeah by the way when you say most people think it is i think it's like ninety nine point ninety nine think it is percent
i don't think it's that high i know a lot of people who may watch the TV news in the evening but don't spend the time to actually read a newspaper
but you don't
right
and i think they're saying well if something's really important i'll at least find out that it happened
yeah
and and that's a that's is a reasonable start and for awhile i didn't read a newspaper when i came out here because i didn't find one that i liked
um and if something important happened it was covered on TV and i could then go and and pick up newspapers if if it were important enough to read about
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and i imagine you get the same level of thing that if somethings that you cared about happened you'd find out from friends or other channels
yeah uh i did on the uh
the Supreme Court hearings uh the for um
uh the whole business of uh see i i actually have a a
Clarence Thomas or
yeah the Thomas and Anita Hill business i i mean that's that's the closest thing i deeply cared about that um
right
uh-huh
and i sort of had planned to have dinner with a friend of mine and when i arrived at her house she was engrossed in that we ended up
watching it for a couple of hours zooming out and grabbing something to eat and then zooming back and eating watching it some more and i thought that was terrific because she actually helped me understand what was going on
but even then i didn't end up doing it on my own um
uh
yeah i stayed as far away from those as i could i decided i didn't want to waste the time i had i guess five years ago now wasted that kind of time with Oliver North hearings and afterwards decided that
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right right yeah
what i had gotten out of it just wasn't worth the time i put in and that these things are just very slow ways of seeing information come out think
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yeah do you ever read
