RACHAEL GREGORY | Local News | Contact
Parking himself in front of the television this morning, local bar worker Michael Donahue told The Advocate that the 24-hour news channel he’s currently watching is trying – and succeeding to scare him.
Though he couldn’t articulate just what is making him anxious, the 29-year-old said that he just feels uneasy and worried after watching the news for so long.
“It’s just all bad,” he said.
“Boomers and their long suffering parents getting deleted from the planet by this spicy cough, people in Afghanistan getting screwed over by Scott Morrison, Boris and Joe Biden. Where is the good news? Haven’t they got something like a video of a cat who likes to swim? Or a chimp that’s learned to play the piano?”
“Anything. I can’t just sit here all day and get told that the world is going to end. I can’t. But I can’t look away. I guess England losing the first Test was good news. Fuck, they suck worse than we do.”
At the moment, the ABC News 24 news cycle is repeating itself every hour, which fresh information and breaking news trickling in every four hours on average.
As the sun begins to set across the country, it’s expected that the time will only blow out further.
Jenny O’Hoolihan, from the public broadcaster’s 24-hour newsroom, spoke to The Advocate a short time ago regarding the feelings that Mr Donahue and thousands of other Australians around the country are experiencing while they watch her news programme.
“We don’t aim to scare and horrify our viewers,” she said.
“We aim to inform them about what’s going on in the world. Unfortunately, at the moment, the news is scary. But off the record, I think he needs to toughen up a bit. He’s in Australia getting paid to sit on the couch. He’s not standing with his family at their airport In Kabul wondering what the fuck you’re going to do.”
More to come.
