• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 11, 2025

Forty-three years ago, Chrissie Hynde wrote the finest metaphor I have ever heard for the way the news media hounds us, bombards us, and invades our homes -- it gets in the house “like a pigeon from hell.”

It was in the 1982 Pretenders single “Back On the Chain Gang,” which online sources say was a song Hynde wrote about grief and loss after the death of a bandmate and friend.

But this particular lyric can be interpreted, especially in the present day, as a lament about the way the delivery of bad news from the outer world intrudes on our lives.

The pigeon metaphor is apt. Pigeons have been used as transmitters of news and messages since ancient times. 

Today, they are city creatures that no one in their right mind would like to see flying around inside their home. 

“Circumstance beyond our control,” wrote Hynde. “The phone, the TV and the news of the world got in the house like a pigeon from hell.”

The inclusion of “the phone” in this sentence definitely does not refer to our modern-day, portable companion -- the cellphone -- that brings us the news of the world like a pigeon from hell in the palm of our hands. These did not exist in 1982.

It likely refers to the way she heard the bad news about her friend. This news might even have been the circumstance beyond her control that she references.

But reading these lyrics now, one cannot help but apply them to the world we live in. 

Many of us are addicted to our newsfeeds. Many of us even recognize the harm it does, yet we do it anyway. 

A friend of mine refers to this consumption of overheated news and commentary as anger-tainment (although I’m not sure he coined it).

What’s the harm? Irritability, trouble concentrating on our own lives instead of worrying about circumstances elsewhere that we cannot control, wasting time with social media and online commentary, and the loss of relationships due to differences of opinion.

I’ve written about this topic before. Today, it is difficult for many to distinguish between fact-based news, biased news, opinion masquerading as news, and straight-up commentary on the news.

Commentary -- not news reporting -- is where so many people get their news today. The highest-rated time periods on the news channels are the prime-time hours, not the hours where there is more news than commentary (if such hours exist anymore).

Many people get their “news” from the prime-time commentary shows on cable. It reminds me of the phenomenon reported long ago that the primary news source for millions of people was not traditional news sources at all, but Jay Leno’s nightly monologue.

The phone and the TV bring us the news of the world like a pigeon from hell entering our houses through windows inadvertently left open.

The pigeon from hell is an unwanted guest. The same could be said of a steady diet of house-on-fire news and information.

Maybe it’s time to close that window.