Howdy. I'm 57. Been around since late 1961. Not the oldest person I know of, for sure, but old enough to have "seen a few things," as current Farmers Insurance advertising goes.
What a state of heightened confusion we live in now. A good bit of the world, certainly, but I'm going to focus on America for this writing. The government, or certainly some integral parts of it, is shut down and has been for 33 days or so. There doesn't appear to be any easy way out of this one, largely due to the current leader elected to be President. Even if he hadn't owned the shutdown on national television, I think you'd be hard pressed to find another person to directly blame for it. Over a wall. Literally.
I've found other writings stating a lot of these same things, but I boil the current state of affairs down to two main instigators, the commercialization of the news and the internet. Kurt Andersen, a writer I admire tremendously, likes to point to the 1960s and technological advances as these instigators, and I think he's largely correct, although I tend to think of the 1960s separately as a social phenomenon. Andersen looks to the 1960s as a time where people began to feel freed of "the way things were" in previous American time periods. And it's an interesting point; I just like to look at more immediate causes, perhaps.
When I was a kid, there was no cable, or at least, we didn't have it where I lived. We had three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. (When I lived in the Rio Grande Valley in the late 60s/early 70s, we only had two channels to choose from. One network's prime time programs were shown amidst some late night programming; "Mission: Impossible," my favorite, for instance.) Each network had its evening nightly news program, 30 minutes, and each local affiliate had its nightly news program, 30 minutes. That was it. Maybe a special report would cut into programming if something really devastating happened, somebody's assassination, for sure. Other than that, the news was done.
The evening network news carried the really heavy stuff, such as the death toll from Vietnam that day. That stuff's burned in my brain. As many have pointed out, that was the first televised war, and I arrived just in time to see it. Bloody soldiers lying on the ground, some wrapped in makeshift tourniquets or whatever was available, was a common visual accompaniment to my dinner. The local news generally contained a recap of important national news but was more fixated on what was happening locally, including weather, but also included sports news and human interest stories. Not a lot of bite in the local news, usually, and people probably preferred that.
But that was it. In late 1979, things changed. The Iran Hostage Crisis began. In an attempt to keep people informed, networks would broadcast after the late local news with any updates on the crisis. After a while, there wasn't much in the way of updates, but people were watching. So, ABC decided to create Nightline, a 30-minute rehash of what had happened in the crisis (if anything). Soon, this format expanded to take on other topics and brought in people to provide opinions. The next thing you know, we had CNN, debuting June 1, 1980, a 24-hours news channel. Now, from an advertising point of view, with a crisis going on, this made sense. Unfortunately, from a hardcore true news point of view, this was terrible. You don't have to have too high an IQ to realize there just is not 24 hours worth of news to report, not on any day. So, what do you fill the news up with? You fill it up with "news." And by that, I mean a continual repeating of the day's headlines, followed by panel after panel of qualified and unqualified people commenting on these headlines. What does it mean? What's next? How does this impact your Aunt Sally's tomato garden? And on and on. Gradually, we had more and more news networks, some more committed to actual news programming than others. Some networks had their opinion people drive the overall tenor of the network (I think you know the ones already). All of them kept real news reporting in there somewhere, but for most of them, it constitutes the minority of their airtime.
As a sidebar (or maybe not), one of my favorite movies of all time (in the top three, for sure) is "Network." Although the movie was made in 1976, it's completely relevant today and shows how damaging commercialization of news is. Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the original screenplay, was one prescient person. It's chilling in a way.
And then you have the advent of the internet. Information without any sort of knowledge or integrity check flying anywhere and everywhere. I don't think I even have to elaborate on this too much, but it's easy to see the negative effects of this, even if the internet (and technology) have brought us some wonderful advances. One thing the internet has done is made everyone a star, even if only in their own little world. I mean, look at what I'm doing here; writing in a blog I don't even publicize (yet), writing just because I can. And like to.
And so, if everyone's a star, egos rise. And then, everyone starts to think that his opinion is vital, important, and perhaps original. But mostly, that that opinion is the correct one. Humility has gone by the wayside. I'm right, you're wrong. Read the comments section after any online news article for a full examination of that (once you wade through the obvious trolling).
Now, if you put all this together, with commercial news channels spewing mostly biased opinion, and people free to spew the spew online....well, you see where we are. My mother often says "I liked it when we had three networks." Although I like watching Netflix as much as anyone else, I have to agree with her when it comes to certain things.
I don't know if I have much else to say on this issue; certainly, I have no ideas to correct course. In the meantime, I mostly watch PBS for news. But then they have sponsors, too. Sigh. Back to the drums....
No comments:
Post a Comment