"And in Other News..."

I owe this post to Pin in Mouth, who posted the following comment to my post on the quake in Pakistan:

We're just sitting here, we hear the news, we pause for a second or two, and then we flip the channel to some random TV sitcom, as if nothing ever happened.

Got me thinking.... it's such a true observation, and we oughta applaud the works of the like of Neil Postman who have brought this phenomenon to our attention. In his writings he was particularly critical about the evening news, as it has had such an effect on the way we view the world, the way we even think. In an interview he noted:

Television always recreates the world to some extent in its own image by selecting parts of that world and editing those parts. So a television news show is a kind of symbolic creation and construction made by news directors and camera crews.

When the earthquake happened in Pakistan, I was at my in-laws' house so I checked out the coverage on all the major news channels (remember, real nomads don't have TVs in their tents): CNN, ABC, NBC, you name it. The pattern was the same: a few happenings around the world were briefly covered, then the typical, "and in other news" transition was heard, then a 40-second blip about the earthquake came, and then, before one could even process or get a real grasp of what on earth was going on, blip! "And we now turn to ongoing coverage of Hurricane Katrina relief..."

"Aaaargghhhh!!!" I complained to my dad over the phone. "I can't even get a decent glimpse of what is going on and what relief is getting there 'cause they won't give the issue more than 30 seconds' attention!"

"That's the point," my dad responded. "They control what you see, and what you know, and therefore, what you think."

At times like this it becomes patently obvious, does it not? The charade of journalism and it's supposedly high standards to inform in an unbiased way...in reality it's nothing more than pure theatrics.

And that's just assuming we keep tuned in to the news. If we've got the itchy finger and are just channel surfing, as Pin in Mouth pointed out, the major distaster becomes just another flash of color and sound that passes us by. It becomes absorbed by the game scores, or the movie, or the "reality" show that flashes on the next channel.

In my parent's house we don't even have a TV. They haven't had one for years (about 8 or 9 methinks). People always ask the same questions: What about educational programming like PBS? And what about the news?

Honestly we've found TV news to be quite useless. The written news is so much more informative and useful especially as they are not trying to keep an audience entertained that they know is gonna tune out if they don't keep flashing enough color and sound. And if you want to *see* something going on, there are tons of streaming webcasts on the internet. I've found that reading the news is a lot more conducive to rational thought than watching it. And then of course the TV news is always so biased whereas there are tons of awesome indie news outlets that will publish the "real deal" that average networks won't do.

Get the Real Deal...

• Independent Media Center
• The Village Voice
• CorpWatch: Holding Corporations Accountable
• Adbusters
• Democracy NOW! Radio