The best drama on television isn’t “ER,” “The West Wing” or “The Sopranos” — it’s your news channel, providing the best drama money can buy, presented in a form available for consumption, 24 hours a day and seven days a week.
Sure, it probably comes as no surprise that the information you take as fact is fiction, a crafted entertainment of the highest caliber, carefully scripted and presented in high-definition widescreen (where available). There’s so much money involved in making this stuff look good that you might even confuse it with reality. But overall, there’s about as much reality in the news as in any reality television show.
What perhaps isn’t as obvious, however, is what you’re missing.
There is no doubt that information is being presented by these newscasts. But it’s shown in ways emphasizing the visual presentation and not the actual content. This has been labeled “sensationalism” in the past, but whatever it is, its powerful formula has proven reliable and financially lucrative for those funding the shows.
But if you think “the news” tells you what’s happening in the world, you’re dreadfully mistaken. First, think about this: Say corporation Y owns a news channel and corporation Y also makes movies, video games, releases music, maybe owns a radio station here or there and perhaps even a newspaper. Wouldn’t it be silly to consider these various mediums separate from one another? Or not influenced by one another? For all these different products — be it a film or a newscast — the end result for corporation Y is the need to sell you something. Under this edict, why shouldn’t coverage of a war look like a video game? Why shouldn’t a television news anchor look like a movie star (well okay, not all of them — but most wear at least as much makeup)?
Of course, there are laws against corporations owning too much. However, recent legislation — such as the Federal Communications Commission’s June 2 vote that decided to further deregulate corporations, (since overturned) — continues to attempt to loosen these laws, which I suggest aren’t working very well as is. Let’s see, there’s CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News and what else? Is this it for diversity in news coverage? Help me out here. There’s probably a few more.
So far, you may have noticed that I’ve chosen to focus solely on television news. “Well, what about the printed word?,” you ask. “Isn’t there any integrity left in that?” To which I answer, “Yes, but it isn’t in one of most of those blue or yellow boxes you find on street corners.” It may not even be in the green one.
Of course, the sensationalism claim is slightly more difficult to make regarding the printed word. A newspaper story is more lengthy, uses a (slightly) higher vocabulary level and requires at least SOME modicum of objectivity. So here I’ll take issue not with reporting methods but again with what’s being reported and what isn’t.
I think one “big picture” we tend to overlook is that we aren’t always the good guys. But we cannot shy away from this, and this is precisely what “the news” tends to ignore. Yes, we can be the very same enemies we claim to be fighting against. Here is an excerpt from an Oct. 12 story that ran in The Independent, a British newspaper that can be found at http://www.independent.co.uk/.
“U.S. soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking U.S. troops.”
Who would, in a million years, see this on any corporate news network? No, this doesn’t fit the story they want to tell; it makes the plot too sloppy and the characters more than one-dimensional. So how about this, from an Oct. 9 story in the Independent Media Center at http://www.indymedia.org/.
“While the corporate media were regurgitating the Bush administration’s lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction and giving Saddam Hussein’s Human Rights Abuses record prominent play, what went unreported was the fact that people like Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol and Dick Cheney have been putting together a plan for American Military Occupation of the Middle East and control of the region’s oil for decades.”
From these small snippets, I conclude that we must search for news outlets that provide us with depth and factual information — not just homogenized nonsense. Let’s get away from these dramas and fictions, start finding the truth and speaking it loud and clear so people can finally hear something different than the sanitization of what’s really going on. Until this happens, don’t believe what you hear or read.