One thing about spending time away from home – even when it’s in the hospital – you have an opportunity to see a whole new selection of television channels.  Not that we are big watchers.  Usually a couple of hours in the evening – PBS News Hour, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Big Bang Theory and, now and then a Ken Burns special.  And, I have to admit, it’s not really what you’d call “quality watching.”  Lotsa nodding off, especially on my part.

Here at Emanuel Hospital in Portland, not only are all the channels and their programming highly mysterious, the powers that be have it rigged so that you have to see some Good Health Programming on the hospital’s “Get Well Network” before you can get to the rest of it.  The first time around, those messages were tolerable.  But now that we seem to be taking advantage of the hospital’s revolving door policy, the messages are getting a little old.  Perhaps I should write a note suggesting they change their presentations occasionally.

But being forced out of our TV comfort zone (for lack of a better description) is sometimes illuminating.  The other night, for instance, we landed on a news program coming directly from the Midwest.  Same- old, same-old news, perhaps with a bit of a right-leaning slant, but the weather report was what really amazed us.  Apparently, it was hot there, but how hot we never found out.  The attractive weather reporter kept saying that “it feels like 96 or 97.”  Yes “feels like.”  What it was on the thermometer was never reported.

In Oysterville we are quite familiar with the “feels like” weather reports – but not coming from a national news channel.  Our “feels like rain” commentaries are more likely to be made one friend to another, perhaps while at the post office getting the mail.  Or, in the winter, it could be “feels like snow.”  But when it comes to temperature… not so much.  We do talk about how cold it feels relative to the wind chill factor – but that report always includes the actual Fahrenheit number as well as the ‘feels like’ temperature with the wind velocity figured in.  It is not a ‘feels like’ standalone like we heard on that news report.

We should have taken note of the channel and the specific news program so we could check it out again.   Maybe it was just a substitute news reporter doing the best she could.  Or maybe that channel is on the cutting edge.  Maybe they are reaching beyond fake news to ‘sensitivity news’ – not how it is, but how it makes you feel.  You know… like ‘Congress appears more alert today’ or ‘England seems lonely this morning’ or ‘it’s feeling a lot like world peace now.’

I guess the best we news consumers can do is to be alert.  Real, fake, or sensitive –in the long run it’s what we can see, hear and touch for ourselves that matters most.  Or so we hope.