If you’re reading this, you probably already know that the mainstream media is a smoldering wasteland of celebrity gossip, stories about sex offenders, and senseless economic hysteria. I contend that it’s worse than you think.
The problem is not so much that people watch and care about these things, that they are entertained by Britney’s blurred out cooch and amused by O’Reilly’s angry rants. We all indulge in such guilty pleasures on occasion.
The challenge facing serious people in America today is that the events that have come to fill the typical news cycle deliberately distract viewers from the developments most likely to shape their lives in the future.
American news organizations of all political slants religiously avoid discussing in any depth science and technological innovation, and avoid giving audience to powerful new ideas of any kind. Economic trends receive a great deal of coverage, but the discussion leaves no lingering understanding of the dynamics at work. International confrontations cause editors to trot out the usual cast of xenophobes and apologists, but any discussions of the historical context or the roots of the conflict are ridiculed as the kind of mushy intellectualism that has no place on the foreign policy battlefield.
Consuming such disposable media is worse than a waste of time. It actually erodes our ability to distinguish between the sensational and the significant.
I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that this is deliberate. To extract lasting information about the general from the specific of current events would be to make punditry unnecessary. If these organizations were truly educating people about the world, they would be furnishing viewers with the tools necessary to learn about and judge the importance of events independently. This is evidently one of the cardinal sins of the modern newsman.
Thou shalt not challenge, thou shalt not offend, thou shalt not empower.
