Friday: I’ve had the chance to watch a little more television the last few days than I usually watch. Normally, all I see are a few sporting events. During football season, I’ll see maybe a college game a month at most, and usually half the Monday Night Football game each week, but not much more than that.
I haven’t watched television news much at all since reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. After reading that, I just couldn’t stand all the nonsense in the news.
I recall Postman asking you to think when you learned something from a news report that caused you to do something differently. He suggested that the only examples of the news changing your behavior would a weather or traffic report. Almost nothing else you hear on the news will really impact your life.
Postman’s biggest criticism of the news is its disjointed character where totally unrelated news items are thrown at the public with no time for thoughtful reflection. And to top it all off, the whole lot of unconnected news items are then interspersed with commercials.
Says Postman:
We have become so accustomed to [news report's] discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, “Now … this.” [Ellipsis in original.] One can hardly overestimate the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place, The damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world. In watching television news, they, more than any other segment of the audience, are drawn into an epistemology based on the assumption that all reports of cruelty and death are greatly exaggerated and, in any case, not to be taken seriously or responded to sanely.
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.
[Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, p104-105]
If you find Postman to be even partially correct in his analysis of news programs, you can see why it really changed how I look at (or more literally, no longer look at) television news.
But I happened to see a few minutes of Good Morning America the other day. The “bubble headed bleach blonde” (see Don Henley below) came on to tell everyone about someone who was arrested because he had been stalking singer Scheryl Crow. This report didn’t make it to the national news because of the relative importance of the event, since it was of no significance to anyone except for Crow herself. I’m sure she was relieved to know this man was no longer on the streets, but it had no possible value (other than entertainment value) for me to know about this man. Obviously, the reason they were reporting this was because they had video of an interview with the stalker. And our “bubble headed bleach blonde” warned us that it was a “disturbing video”.
She was a real professional; it was clear how she had made it to the level of a national news talking head. She made her disturbed face, and shook her head slightly as she said “disturbing video”. Marvelously effective. She made it believable that the video was disturbing, and after all that is what truth on television is all about.
Again, according to Postman:
[T]elevision provides a new (or, possibly, restores an old) definition of truth: The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. “Credibility” here does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness (choose one or more) conveyed by the actor/reporter.
[Postman, p101-102]
She gave the impression of being sincerely disturbed in an authentic way, while at the same time she didn’t make a face so grotesque as to mar her attractive face. I imagine she must have practiced for hours in front of the mirror to master the disturbed look. What a professional.
Watching her reminded me why I don’t watch television news anymore.
If you don’t want to read Postman’s chapter on television news, you can just listen to Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry.
We’ve got the bubble headed bleach blonde
Comes on at five.
She can tell you ’bout the plane crash
With a gleam in her eye.
It’s interesting when people die.
Give us dirty laundry.Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know the boys in the news room
Got a running bet.
Get the widow on the set.
We need dirty laundry.
What a great song, and incredibly insightful lyrics. This song was running through my head all day after seeing that short clip from Good Morning America.
Another television moment from yesterday. Flipping around the channels, we ran across Terminator 3, and watched a couple minutes of it. We saw when Arnold is driving the hearse. As the Terminatrix jumps on top and begins to cut through the roof, Kate Brewster screams to Arnold, “Do something!”
He then proceeds to sheer the roof off the hearse by cutting under a tractor trailer, leaving the Terminatrix behind with the roof of the car.
What do we learn from this? Obviously, Arnold is a real man of action. When faced with a crisis, and called upon to act, he saves the people in his care from most certain harm.
Imagine having him for your governor. If I were to in an emergency cry out to my governor, Fast Eddy Rendell, “Do something!” he would leap into action by trying to raise my taxes or pushing slot machines on me. Not quite the same thing as what Arnold would do.
The irony of my complaining about the news being entertainment and then immediately praising a politician for his image earned because he is an entertainer is not lost upon me.
I’ll just say that Postman’s book has a chapter on politicians as entertainers, and leave it at that for tonight.
I went out to a park this afternoon with my brother and his family. We took our dogs with us. At one point, I was walking around the lake with him as his dog, Loki, was pulling as hard as he could to the left, causing him to walk at about a 45 degree inclination to the left. It was very interesting to watch him walk in that tilted way.
As we walked, a little boy behind us said very clearly, with a heavy southern accent, “Hey, Daddy! Look at that dog walking all sideways!”
“Yep,” his father replied with just as much of a southern accent. “He’s sure is walking all sideways.”
I thought that was a pretty good way of describing it. Walking all sideways.
In someways, we all tend to do that. We pull one way or the other, and slant everything in the way we view it. This afternoon, Loki slanted everything to the left. Well, I slant to the right. I think that I see my slant, and I think my slant is the right way to see things. But perhaps I’m just struggling against what is pulling me back the other way, just like Loki who is “walking all sideways.” And perhaps others get as much of a kick out of seeing me with my funny rightward slant.
Then again, maybe I’m just pushing an analogy too far.
I’ve never been good at analogies. Analogies are like hot dogs. Too many of them will give you a stomach-ache.
I told you I wasn’t any good at analogies….
Good night.
