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.
www.deadissue.com
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