Info-tainment
Unless you see it happen with your own eyes, everything is editorialized. If you see a car wreck, tell your mother, she tells her neighbor and they tell a co-worker, chances are that theco-worker's vision of the carnage is much different than what you saw. Each successive interpreter of the story puts a slant on it or leaves something out. This is editorial-ism. Sometimes it is unintentional, but most times it isn't. At least where the media is concerned.
Some of you may live in pretty rural areas (lucky bastards), but most of us live in the cities. If you do, and you happen to get your daily information fix from the local TV news channel this should come as no surprise. Without fail, every time I tune in the 6pm Evening News, there is always a bold graphic with an urgent sounding voice-over, "Breaking News ONLY on Channel 12: Pickup Truck Stuck In A Dry Creek Bed.....News-Copter 12 is on the scene...come in Captain Dave."
There has to be a breaking news story to get your attention. It has be to urgent, and if it is bleeding or on fire....ALL THE BETTER. Lets face it, our inner demons love looking at the things we aren't supposed to see. Do all those Nascar fans go to see who wins or who hits the wall hardest? Since producers and editors know this, and since producers and editors jobs are on the line if the advertisers don't show up to cover their paychecks....Captain Dave is kept pretty busy hovering near overturned vehicles and house fires. Not that this is News by the way....it is just good entertaining carnage and destruction. If they were still sacrificing Christians in the Colosseum in Rome, you know the news blimps would be fighting for the airspace above it.
This sort of media manipulation has been going on since scribes put pen to parchment. What concerns me at this point is the saturation level. There is a growing segment of the population that is feeding off this like hungry piranha.
When I was a young man in college I had one of those moments that made me stop and think. I was working in the college media center. This is back in the day when most of us still had black & white televisions, and there was no cable, much less the Internet. You had three channels (ABC / NBC / CBS) and that was it. One evening I was alone in the media center and had all three of the networks up on different studio monitors and watched all three nightly news casts at the same time. It was eye opening to say the least.
The lead story on ABC and NBC was the same, but it was the 3rd story on CBS. Likewise all the other stories deemed newsworthy by the network gods were jumbled in random order, and some were missing entirely from various stations. This puzzled me. Who was making the decision on what I should and shouldn't know about?
Later that evening, I walked back to my college apartment and turned on my shortwave radio (yes I used to have one, Radio Moscow was a hoot to listen to). I tuned in the hourly BBC shortwave broadcast (which always started out with the chiming of Big Ben and the intro "This Is London") and got the 'world' prospective. I was amazed that almost none of the stories on the BBC were even mentioned on the American nightly newscasts. Especially the 47 Ugandans that had been murdered that afternoon. Africans dying back then wasn't considered real news-worthy I suppose.
This is what started the seed in my mind about who was telling me what and for what reason. That seed has since grown into a redwood.
Media outlets lean more and more toward hype and our base voyeur instincts and less and less toward the knowledge that we really need to make an informed decision.
As in school or any training class, repetition is the key to retention. You memorize things until they become second nature. That includes what you see as well. Repeated images of Paris Hilton /IEDs in Iraq / and college gunman reinforce the 'image' not the message.
You can tell teenage girls not to act like Paris Hilton, but the more they see her, the more they want to be like her.
You can tell folks that we are winning the war in Iraq, but if all you show are Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) blowing up American soldiers, that isn't the perception.
You can report on the missed opportunities to help a troubled student before they go postal, but the resultant images and media blitz only reinforces a troubled youth's belief that violence is a valid option.
Media has always manipulated the masses that watch it. William Randolph Hearst knew that, so does Rupert Murdoch, but I don't think anyone is questioning what the digital revolution and global compression are doing regarding the effect on society's mental health not to mention its ability to make an informed decision.
Which brings me to the title of this Blog. I suspect that there is actual a psychology to the evening news format that goes beyond our thirst for voyeurism. I have noticed this pattern in local news coverage. I call it the Murder / Puppy Dog / Car Wash scenario.
The lead off story, is usually some grisly murder or death (preferably with pictures). This imagery is sad and depressing, but holds our 'thriller' interest.
The next news story is warm and cuddly. Usually involving a furry animal or baby or an elderly person riding a unicycle or knitting the worlds largest pot-holder. This calms our fears and anxiety and softens or erases the images of grisly death from the first story.
Then comes the story of redemption. The car wash, which is usually being held by high school students to raise money for the funeral of their classmate who was killed in the previous days grisly murder. Thereby leaving the viewer with some sense that there is hope in a really wacky and screwed up world.
Then they go to commercial.
You may laugh at this and think I am stretching it a bit. But seriously, watch your local news and keep in mind that those stories are not put there in random order. There is a producer / news editor behind the scenes pulling strings and determining what you need to see and what you need to know (and what you need to think).
Hand me the remote....I want to see what is on Cartoon Network.
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