Election Year Blues

All news is local.

   Media pundits are already speculating on the results of the election later this year, which means we face nine more months of yadda-yadda before voters decide the makeup of the next Congress. And even that won't bear fruit until next January. That's when the fun really starts.
   No wonder many Americans tune out or turn off when the nightly news comes on the tube. Others don't bother reading a major metropolitan newspaper, preferring a local daily or weekly that focuses on what's happening nearby.
   For these folks, the antics of delegates at the state capitol, in Washington or even at the UN have little or no relevance to what they have to cope with in their daily lives.
   Depending on your outlook, then, all news is local. For those with an international perspective, it's important to know what's happening in Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Tehran, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Beijing or other world capitals and how those events relate to the U.S. For them, the world is a locality.
   For others, their focus is on a national or a state level. And for many more, they care only about what's going on in their nearby region -- county, town, school district or their neighborhood.
   The word "neighbor," by the way, is derived from the same root that becomes "nigh," or "near" in English, and the Dutch "boer," or "farmer," and the English "boor," an old word for farmer that has acquired connotations of "rustic" and "uneducated."

   News junkies, however, now face months of yammering by politicians and commentators about the doings and the potential undoings of prominent people, be they government officials, entertainment personalities or sports-affiliated folk.
   Even those who are not news junkies will face the challenge of trying to ignore an almost constant barrage of reporting on what senior government officials are up to.
   These days, given the amount of controversy generated by the current president, the barrage is bigger, louder and longer than ever.
   Whether this much time and print space should be devoted to these goings-on is a point that conservative supporters argue against.
   "You cannot and should not criticize the president, because he is the president," they say. Oddly, they did not apply this same standard to Barack Obama, attacking anything and everything he said and did, even to questioning his place of birth and whether that disqualified him from the presidency.
   (Note: The Constitution specifies that a presidential candidate be a "natural born citizen." It does not say "native born." And since Obama's mother was from Kansas, it would not have mattered where young Barack was born. In any case, he was in fact born in Hawaii, one of the 50 United States. Therefore, his citizenship qualifies him on either count -- both natural born and native born.
   (Similarly, Republican candidate Ted Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father, yet there was hardly any fuss made about his qualification. He did, however, make a show of "renouncing" Canadian citizenship, but since he was brought back to the U.S. as a child, there is some doubt as to whether he ever claimed it.)
   
   As for the amount of time and space news media devote to presidential actions and sayings, they will continue to report both, and commentators will continue to opine about what he means and what the effects might be.
   This is the right and responsibility of a free press, a right guaranteed by the Constitution and exercised by commentators ranging from Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh on the conservative wing as well as liberal writers and commentators on print outlets.
  
   The public now faces the issue of how much coverage and commentary is too much. There is, of course, the option that many have already taken: They click the "off" button, switch channels or turn the page. However, that does not make the story go away.
   Reality has a way of intruding on everyday life.