Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Lots of information, but the real story is missing (TV drowns truth in a sea of irrelevance)
Victoria Times Colonist ^ | July 31, 2006 | Brigitte Pellerin

Posted on 07/31/2006 9:48:46 AM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA

Neil Postman was right, even if it makes me sound like a snob to say it. That's the obvious, if painful, conclusion I reached after watching some of the television news coverage of evacuees from Lebanon last week. Especially the first few boatloads.

As Postman warned more than 20 years ago, it wasn't George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Big- Brother nightmare that was dangerous to Western societies.

It was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World-type scenario, in which people come "to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think," against which we should have guarded.

In the foreword to his seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Postman wrote: "Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.

Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.

Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy." Huxley was right, as Postman saw, and the blame rests squarely on the way television shapes public discourse.

Take, for instance, the amount of breathless "reporting" on minute details of people's travel arrangements. I almost threw the remote at the screen when one anchor started discussing what kind of luggage evacuees were carrying with the exhausted on-location reporter. The anchor speculated on what these harried folks had had time to stuff into their carry-ons, and whether there was someone nearby ready to help carry them off the ship.

Talk about a sea of irrelevance. It's dumb, uninformative and anti-useful.

For it gives viewers nothing but an excuse to sit on the couch, emoting and not doing anything other than emoting.

It's sort of like watching porn. You just sit there enjoying emotional cheap thrills as preposterous scenarios unfold, in this case a frenzy of misery because it took a while to process thousands of people escaping a war zone on a cruise ship.

Isn't it awful that they were stuck in the sun for many long hours? Without water or food? Or without the certainty that there would be a spot for them on the next ship? Yeah, probably. I certainly wouldn't want to be in their shoes. But their problem was having to flee a war zone, not getting a bad seat while doing it.

Mine was hearing 1,432 versions of the same inane sob story that could only appeal to someone who had lost all capacity to think.

Commenting on the televised American presidential debates between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984 -- or rather, "debates," since there's virtually never any exchange of ideas on the set -- Postman wrote that in such a format "complexity, documentation and logic can play no role." The two men "were less concerned with giving arguments than with 'giving off' impressions, which is what television does best.

"Post-debate commentary largely avoided any evaluation of the candidates' ideas, since there were none to evaluate. Instead, the debates were conceived as boxing matches, the relevant question being, Who KO'd whom?" In the intervening 20-odd years, television's ability to peddle emotions while smothering actual information and ideas has only gotten worse.

Postman didn't see the emergence of what Florence King in 1999 called "the age of the teddy bear on the sidewalk," but if he had he would not have been surprised to watch CNN's Anderson Cooper crying on television while covering hurricane Katrina last year, or sunburned and dishevelled reporters sitting in Cyprus or Turkey giving us a saccharin account of what evacuees carry on with their carry-ons instead of, oh, I don't know, a history lesson about Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah.

I know. Folks love it. Certainly Cooper has never been more in demand.

Pornography is popular too, but that doesn't mean it's healthy, especially not for our capacity to think and act like complete human beings.

"In the Huxleyan prophecy," Postman wrote, "Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture- death is a clear possibility." Methinks we ought to have guarded against that.


TOPICS: Canada; Culture/Society; Editorial; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: bigbrother; bumblepuppy; culturedeath; emoting; emotingtocnn; feelies; huxleyanprophecy; lebanon; orgyporgy; seaofirrelevance; tvnews
This This column explains why TV News is bad for us -- regardless of the biases in the "content". It's drowning us in "a sea of irrelevance", and undoing our "capacity to think".

The same could be said about movies, such as Algore's Pack of Convenient Lies, and anything by Michael Moore. People sit through them, emoting all the while, and lose their capacity to think.
1 posted on 07/31/2006 9:48:50 AM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: USFRIENDINVICTORIA

Gresham's law applied to information.

Bad information drives out knowledge.
Facts replaced by opinion, opinion by emotion.
We are left wit hsimply evocations of emotionalism.
Such emotionalism is validated by the vacuousness created by moral relativism and nihilism.
"All Emotions are Created Equal".

The Triumph of PR over reality.
That may explain the absurdity of Hezbollah winning a "PR War"... Amazing, a horrible terrorist organization gets better PR than a democratic Government:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/who-is-this-man.html


2 posted on 07/31/2006 9:54:51 AM PDT by WOSG
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: USFRIENDINVICTORIA

I read "Brave New World" about five years ago. My favorite quote on my profile page is from that book.

Huxley was ahead of his time. Almost everything in that book is coming to pass - such as parents viewed as an antiquated idea, babies created in laboratories and raised by "experts", sex as a preoccupation only to keep people happy, and "happiness" seen as the ultimate goal. We're heading in that direction right now.

There are a few things Huxley didn't predict, but he was awful close.


3 posted on 07/31/2006 10:00:55 AM PDT by Tired of Taxes (That's taxes, not Texas. I have no beef with TX. NJ has the highest property taxes in the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: USFRIENDINVICTORIA

The situation is worse today than the inability of a previous generation to distinguish fact from opinion and propaganda which prompted Dorothy L. Sayers to write:

"The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. They are literate in the merely formal sense - that is, they are capable of putting the symbols C, A, T together to produce the word CAT. But they are not literate in the sense of deriving from those letters any clear mental concept of the animal. Literacy in the formal sense is dangerous, since it lays the mind open to receive any mischievous nonsense about cats that an irresponsible writer may choose to print - nonsense which could never have entered the heads of plain illiterates who were familiar with an actual cat, even if unable to spell its name."


4 posted on 07/31/2006 10:13:44 AM PDT by Montaignes Cat
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: USFRIENDINVICTORIA

They ignore and tell lies on the big stories and then focus on trivialities. Thats the media of today in a nutshell


5 posted on 07/31/2006 10:16:07 AM PDT by GeronL
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: USFRIENDINVICTORIA

Excellent!
CNN is the worst, but FOX is not far behind.


6 posted on 07/31/2006 10:39:38 AM PDT by Lorianne
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Lorianne
As Postman said, they all use "talking hairdos" to present the news. CBS has to be the prime example of that now, with Katie Couric in the anchor's chair. I gave up TV about a year ago; but I'm sure that Katie is giving viewers plenty to emote about.
7 posted on 07/31/2006 11:20:38 AM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies]

To: Tired of Taxes
When I read "Brave New World" and "1984" (well before the actual year, I'm afraid), I thought that "1984" was the scariest scenario. Now, it's obvious that Huxley's was more dangerous. Unfortunately, it seems that the mass media is using "Brave New World" as a how-to manual, rather than as a cautionary tale.
8 posted on 07/31/2006 11:29:51 AM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: USFRIENDINVICTORIA

Interesting quote from an article at this link:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1676113/posts?page=1

>>>> Wilde summed up the unique complexities of the case, saying "we're kind of in this brave new world of surrogate parents. <<<<




9 posted on 08/01/2006 8:59:16 PM PDT by Tired of Taxes (That's taxes, not Texas. I have no beef with TX. NJ has the highest property taxes in the nation.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: Tired of Taxes

From the "truth is stranger than fiction" department ....


10 posted on 08/01/2006 10:18:11 PM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson