October 26, 2006: Keeping Up with the News
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

Keeping up with the news while cruising in the early days was not always easy or even possible. We missed many a major world happening. For instance, the Six Day War took place during a week when we had a family cruising with us in the Sea of Cortez. We missed that war entirely. Our guests wrote to us to tell us the score. Bobby Kennedy was shot during an Atlantic crossing. We did not hear of it until my mother mentioned it in an aerogram we collected in Falmouth.

We tried to pick up the BBC on short wave, and foreign equivalents, along with any local stations we could pick up and understand. The interesting thing we discovered is that each station slants the news differently - emphasizing, minimising, or eliminating entirely. Or misrepresenting - as we discovered on the rare occasions when we had been at the scene of a newsworthy event. We remember the ABC (Australia) reporting that an immense independence rally had taken place in the Place de Cocotiers in Noumea earlier in the day. We had been there. This particular lunchtime "manifestation" was a peaceful gathering of people representing the many races in New Caledonia supporting the French presence, making speeches and singing the Marseillaise. (Mind you, those of a different mindset simultaneously let off an explosion in another part of the city.) At the time of the coming of independence for New Hebrides, when the British and the French passed over the reins of their condominium government to the people of what became "Vanuatu", it was ABC that reported it as "an angry mob milling through the streets", whereas in reality it was a small crowd of people waving plastic flags, politely applauding the speeches of first the British High Commissioner, then the French equivalent, and finally the new Vanuatan prime minister Walter Lini, before getting into the feasting which followed. There was a bit of a scandal when it was discovered that the supporting TV pictures had been filmed in Africa! As a result of these and other skewed newscasts we have become wary of news. An interesting aside here: it was an account in the Wall Street Journal mailed to us in Port Vila that gave the most evenhanded account of the complexities of the handover. We were to hear the local people asking, not many weeks after, "When is this independence going to end?".

SSB or ham radio nets were another source of news for us. Sometimes a news devotee would compress the day's news for the benefit of fellow cruisers, and deliver it at the same time each morning. We do rather better these days in keeping abreast of the news, but have developed an aversion to newscasts with their tales of droughts and floods, avalanches and earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, genocide, massacres and mass starvation, terrorist plots and suicide bombers, family violence and child abuse, drug busts and drug-induced violence, rigged elections, general sleaze and business collapses, wars, hatred and rage. It is much less harrowing to live in blissful ignorance. Michel refuses to hear newscasts, preferring to listen to the birds, to music, to the conversation of friends. I tune in via earphones to Radio NZ and the BBC, giving him a rundown every so often. We also read whatever news or scientific magazines we can lay our hands on, current favourites being The Economist, The Listener (NZ) and New Scientist, more often than not a few weeks out of date. Today, many cruising yachts are equipped to pick up the news of the world in mid-ocean from their favourite newspaper direct from the Internet. We've not yet reached that level of electronic wizardry.