DAYTON, Ohio — A local man who described himself Sunday as someone who “never watches the news” went on to cite approximately 11 hours of it during a conversation that began as a question about whether he wanted more coffee.
“I don’t watch any of that stuff. Total waste of time,” said Dale Pruett, 58, a retired HVAC estimator, before summarizing a cable segment from that morning, two segments from the previous evening, a weekend panel discussion he described as “the one with the eight people,” and a 40-minute call-in program he referred to only by the host’s first name. “I get my information from real people.”
Pruett’s wife, Janice, said the television in the couple’s den has been on continuously since 2011.
“He doesn’t watch it. He just has it on, in the room, facing him, while he sits in front of it,” Janice Pruett said. “If you turn it off, he says, ‘I was watching that.’ Then he says he never watches it. Both of those happen in the same sentence.”
According to family members, Pruett can recite the scrolling text from the bottom of the screen for any date since 2009 and has twice written to a cable network to correct its own archive. He sleeps with the set on and, according to his wife, responds to it in his sleep; on at least two occasions, she said, the anchor has responded back. Last spring, Pruett correctly announced a commercial break 11 minutes before it occurred, then said he had “no idea what’s on that thing.”
Prof. Desmond Achterberg, who holds the Prewitt Chair in Comparative Annoyance at Ellery State University, said Pruett belongs to a long tradition.
“Men who do not follow the news have existed for as long as there has been news,” Achterberg said. “There is a well-documented case from the 1640s of a man who told his entire village he never listened to the town crier, and who then followed the crier from square to square for 31 years, correcting his pronunciation. The scholarship on this is extensive. Most of it is mine.”
Pruett acknowledged that he will “glance at it maybe five minutes a day.” The Continental Press Service was unable to verify the five minutes, as Pruett’s television has not been turned off long enough to establish a baseline.
Pruett’s adult son, Kyle, said he had attempted to discuss a news event with his father during a visit in August and was told that the event was “fake,” followed by a 25-minute account of the event in greater detail than Kyle had been able to find.
At press time, Pruett had stopped to say he did not have time for any of this, then asked the reporter to move slightly to the left because he was blocking it.