. . . I await your explanation as to what, exactly, you think I might have done about JFK's assassination or the princess' death, had I been given a blow-by-blow account of it in real time?
I'm not asking you to do anything.Truly? I am not sure about that.
If, heaven forefend, you were to find yourself in peril because the ice on the lake was thinner than you suspected and you are now in frigid water, you would draw my attention to your plight and earnestly ask me to venture in some way to help you escape. I on the other hand would be put in a different distress: lacking a rope I must now choose between behaving as a coward, and venturing into harms' way myself at the risk of sharing your fate.
Journalism creates certain emotional facts. It is not entirely clear that they are healthy for the audience. Of course I wasn't in Dallas when JFK died, nor in Paris when the princess died--but still, I am being asked at some emotional level to participate in the event by being a passive--hence implicitly cowardly--bystander to tragedy.
Of course drama does the same thing, even when we have conscious knowledge that in fact it's all "pretend." But your heart rate doesn't seem to know that, does it? Certainly I am not proposing the abolition of drama, but having said that I can and do question the dosage level to which we subject ourselves.
The holocaust movie footage of emaciated Jewish corpses represent a historical reality. It is well to be clear that we must face down any temptation towards a slippery slope headed in any such direction, and seeing that footage once is perhaps therefore salutory. But seeing that same footage daily could, I would argue must, tend to desensitize the viewer in whom it caused no worse imbalance.
"Dosage makes the poison." I consider broadcast journalism to be an overdose.
Hey, don't knock the teletubbies.
Without their keen investigative journalism, I never would have known that the sun was really a gurgling infant.