I was thinking today about the multitude of topics my mind has been consumed by lately. Now that I’ve banished cable news from my life, it’s like I’m finally able to change the channel in my head. Removal of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News has left more time for reading the paper and listening to talk radio. The difference I’m experiencing is startling. Aside from being thankfully less aware of the whatever juicy crime tale the media has anointed worthy of a Hollywood juicing, hearing the term ‘expert analysis’ no longer makes me feel like I’m being taken advantage of at a carnival.
The one on one debate with moderator format acts now as a disguise for what folks used to call a ‘clip joint’. To understand the meaning of this old-timey reference, envision having paid two bits to see the world’s tallest man, only to sit down and discover that the performer is on stilts. In very much the same way, the studio set has created an economy for any person who now or at one time – any time – held a title pertaining at all to the script for that day. Military officers who in the past were on the ground themselves groaning over the way the ‘news’ pertaining to their efforts was cold-filtered before it hit the public, are now selling out quite readily upon retirement. No longer is it necessary to win an election to gain influence, as the more convenient route via agent and stylist simply eliminates the middleman.
A marketing ploy used by salesmen of all ages, the ability to eliminate the middleman has always been the perfect hook. Brilliantly this word has shifted in the case of news coverage from meaning ‘government’ to ‘John Q. Public’ ever since the first war with Iraq during the Bush Sr. years. CNN validated the idea of 24-hour news in spite of the fabled ten-minute American attention span. As the market has evolved over the years, the ten-minute attention span has dictated whether the game was to report the news or turn it into theater. Just as anything else in our culture, the successful medium was packed with bells, whistles and ‘experts’ aimed to mesmerize, while prospectors dug around in the back for every possible pocket of profitability that existed.
These ‘experts’ continue to cash in on the public’s affinity for conflict. The amount of times where this dynamic is milked within the media has skyrocketed in recent years. Any consumer who takes in at least an hour of reality TV per week will attest to the fact that the point of the show often comes second to the conflict that comes out of forcing the contestants to co-exist. Oddly enough, the idea behind MTV’s ‘The Real World’ acts as a porthole towards understanding why people are tuning in to cable news every night in lieu of reading a newspaper. The easy, yet wrong, assumption often made is that laziness dictates whether someone chooses to ingest their news intravenously or with knife and fork.
The desire to feel qualified or informed on what’s happening in the world isn’t determined by motivation as much as it is a sense of duty. Some of us have had it instilled within us that we must be interested in what’s going on in the world, for the sake of anything from being responsible for the country to expressing gratitude for having been born here in the first place. The desire to choose one form of information over another is due to our nature as human beings and the thrill that conflict naturally stirs up within us. After days where the grind has beaten the average American worker down, the promise of conflict to watch on TV provides a release for those of us who would most likely get fired if we let people know how we really felt about them. Reality TV and cable news shows provide us the release we long for, even if the person getting ‘served’ is someone we’ll never even meet.
I call this the, ‘Oh Yea? Well Screw You!’ demographic. It’s alive, well and swelling within our society. The urge to satisfy this hunger has engulfed what we used to refer to as news. As news is no longer what happened where and why, but instead what two or more opposing shills were able to quibble about over it. The medium provides a cushion for those in charge of the country, as regardless of who was responsible for something bad happening, from the moment the story breaks we’re provided with an ‘expert’ pointing the finger and the other saying ‘nuh-uh’ before the ink dries. Well paid talking heads read off a prompter, what the money has decided to anoint as news. With human nature being such an understood and exploitable science, we all appear to the money as credit lines on the open range begging to be pandered into comas.
The antidote for me was to kill my television. Parents can block out what channels they don’t want their children to see, and since having done that very thing to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, I’ve been hanging with a better crowd. I’m no longer spending my time with bad influences, those people mom warned you about who’d turn you into a thug if you weren’t careful. Cable news is the equivalent of what we were told as children to stay away from, be it booze, drugs or loose women. All of these things provide a momentary sense of happiness and relief, dangerous in that unless careful, over time, any of them could end up turning you into something you’re not.
In the end it’s all too clear that I’m just not one of the ‘cool kids’. Peer pressure to just drink the kool-aid and shut up has it’s way of making sense all too often, but nothing will ever convince me of the absurd notion that money will sacrifice itself for the sake of doing the right thing. Cable news is in the business of convincing us otherwise.
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