Give Me My Daily News Today

For me, the daily news is essential (©t-online)

The graphic is not that easy to explain. The study's authors call it the beginning of a new area and claim that younger people are immersed in various Internet platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tiktok, and Spotify, and are ditching the daily news. Indeed, their media behavior has changed profoundly, but why so dramatically over the last two Corona years? But older people also seem tired of the news, the authors write.

 
Is this true for old Red Baron? Following my retirement in 2000, I haven't listened to the radio except once in a while to France Info, a radio station emitting les actualités in neighboring France.

Since my return to Germany in 2001, my television consumption was limited to the news and the 90 minutes Tatort, the popular German detective series always on Sunday evenings featuring various pairs of investigators operating in diverse German cities.

Nowadays, time permitting, I watch the news on television only twice a day: at 5 p.m. for 15 minutes on ARD, Germany's public Channel One, and at 7 p.m. for 20 minutes on ZDF public channel 2, just to see the difference between the two news centers.

My Tatort watchlist boiled down considerably to one pair of investigators operating in the Westphalian Münster. It is not the action that interests me but the spicy dialog between the two protagonists, Main Commissioner Frank Thiel and forensic Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne, reminding me of the Old Couple Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau.

I rarely watch something else on TV, but I get my fill on mental food and news on the Internet, starting with Der Spiegel, die Badische Zeitung, La Liberation, and the New York Times, which I read all in digital form. Also, I read books I acquire online whenever possible due to my lack of shelf space at home and economizing paper simultaneously.

So in my case, I am not tired of the news, although they are highly depressive these days. Switching for information to the Internet went gradually and did not happen abruptly over the last two years. In other words, I cannot help the authors interpret their data.

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