Pavlov rang the bell, the dogs drooled. The media directs, we mourn
or we scorn -- we rage, we mock, we believe, we vote, we ignore.
At
last, at least for a while yesterday, our media circus was forced to
notice that there's a world outside the Seminole county Courthouse and
took some time out from endless speculation and pointless discussion of
the George Zimmerman trial to obsess about the Asiana airliner that
landed short in San Fransisco. In fact as of Monday Morning, it's still
"Breaking News" long after the wreckage has gone cold and the survivors
taken to hospitals or released.
Yes, two people died,
as did many others in transportation related incidents over the weekend.
67 people were murdered in Chicago, one of the gun control capitols of
our nation. 10 people died horribly when their plane caught fire in
Alaska but I didn't hear a thing about it on CNN, nor about the runaway
train explosion that killed 5 with 40 still missing.as the maudlin dirge
droned and the newsreaders groaned on and on speculating and
conjecturing and playing the same interviews and showing the same
pictures of a California runway until I gave up and turned it off.
Oh, the humanity.
Yes, people who still read
news heard about those other things and more, but I suspect they're in
the minority. We get angry, we get upset; we mourn and we get indignant
according to what we're given to pay attention to by others who profit
by it and through it.
Last Saturday, driving home, I was
astonished to see an ocean of flags huge and small on Route 1 as it
passes through this tiny burg. Dozens of police motorcycles, black
limos, police cars and a hearse followed by hundreds of cars carrying
flags; motorcycles with flags down a highway lined with mourners waving
flags in the 86 degree heat. The President had a far smaller motorcade
when he came through town last year.
A local sergeant
killed in Afghanistan was being brought home for burial. It's not that
many people knew him. It's not that his death was more or less tragic
than all the others in all our needless wars. It's not that he was more
or less a hero than anyone else in uniform and it's certainly not as
though his loss and his family's grief had anything to do with a
sacrifice for "our freedom." But that's how it was sold by the papers,
or rather by the corporate owners answerable to people who want to
promote war and acceptance of war and the glorification of war. All
those thousands, all these years, but this, now.
As with all parts of America, friends, neighbors, sons and daughters
have been lost in this longest and most expensive of American wars. For a
long time after we blew Baghdad halfway to hell, the dead were brought home in secret, the media bullied into
not printing or reading lists of the casualties lest we seem to
disapprove of it all, like those hippies in the 70's. but it's
not about America mourning the loss of its volunteer soldiers, it's
about entertainment, about deluding ourselves that we don't respond to
the ringmaster like circus performers -- to the conductor like an
orchestra playing this great emotional symphony while the grip tightens
on our lives.
Jeeze, this is an awfully good post!
ReplyDeleteHas our media ever been about news, about informing citizens who will presumably make wiser choices at the voting booth – wiser than last time? No, our media is merely the latest iteration of a primitive ritual engaged by post-modern aborigines still raising war whoops around an open campfire. Ravings and Nielson ratings, have people advanced through the millennia? I think not.
It wasn't always so. My hope, and I'm quessing it is yours as well, is somehow we regress to what was a time when we actually had some journalists that had integrity. Sam Donaldson? Mike Wallace?... Others?
Delete... let me add Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite to your list.
DeleteTo their partial credit, I think the network news is much better. They don't have infinite jabber time so they tend to stick more to the facts and even though you get only a few ratingsworthy stories you might actually hear for instance that there was a revolution going in in Egypt, during which time CNN and MSNBC had their cameras fixed on George Zimmerman's face while we had to listen to the forensic DNA man explain the qualifications of his lab and what DNA was ad nauseam.
ReplyDeleteThank god for PBS and the BBC and of course the internet that lets us read the world's news. The rest is just a three ring circus: CNN MSNBC and of course the Fox.
I agree with you Captain, that the networks hold some semblance to the historical view of what TV news should be. Solution? Just kill your TV. It should be worth it to not hear the commercials alone.
ReplyDeleteI always choose CBS when I hook up a land antenna for important political events. Better than that...
Point an FM/VHF/UHF antenna at the nearest PBS transmitter. Granted it's not going to be Los Angeles public television, but you may receive public television in some form or another.
Normal television is just a burnout.
I have satellite -- afraid I'm an addict.
ReplyDelete