Yes, this probably puts me over my quota of TIME references for the past month, but I had to laugh reading Poniewozik's "Media Freak-outs: Every Week is Shark Week" on the Metro this morning, and couldn't resist passing it along. (He starts with a quote from 30 Rock, but sounds like a professional throughout the column. What better happy medium between pop culture and serious journalism is there?)
In honor of this week being Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, Poniewozik relates our fascination with the fear, awe and occasional hysteria these animals inspire in us to the media's sensationalist treatment of issues that are not, in fact, the crises they're made out to be. "To live every week like it's Shark Week...might be a metaphor for living in our media environment," he says.
[T]o spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor.(This is where I started laughing, and attracted some nervous, sideways glances from my fellow Metro riders.)
And Poniewozik is exactly right. A lack of education and comprehensive health care will have a much more - and certainly much longer-lasting - negative impact on your life than the inability to buy your dream home for a time because no bank will lend you the money. But the housing market is where the numbers are crashing and burning, and things that crash and burn are what keep the ratings up. Our education and health care systems have been going up in flames for years; that crisis isn't interesting anymore. At least not interesting enough to convince people to stay tuned for the 11 o'clock news.
I rarely watch actual news broadcasts because I absolutely loathe this kind of mass hysteria-inducing reporting that the ratings game fuels. I frankly don't care what issue makes an anchor pull out their "now this is really, really serious, folks" voice. I want the most up-to-date facts so that I know what's going on in the world (which, like, OMG, so totally does not include the status of Jon and Kate Gosselin's love lives as reported on CNN!), and I want to decide for myself what my reaction is. It's the job of commentators like Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow to comment on the news; a news anchor's job is to report it.
And reporting is important. Even if the day's new record low or high percentage of whatever that the media is screaming about isn't high on my list of things to lose sleep over in the long run, it's still good to know. I could just do without the screaming.
Poniewozik recognizes that the media has gotten off track:
Ideally, the media should help us place our worries in perspective. But often they encourage the disaster mentality by focusing on the trendy menace - the sleeper cell, the Obama-conspiracy e-mails, the pandemic, the shark - jumping on hot-button distractions and rushing to label every new crisis the worst ever.So in the world of the 24-hour news cycle, ruled by the cable networks, how do we get the media back on track and reporting on the issues that matter in the long-term, not just the crisis du jour?
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5 comments:
I found a solution that works. (For me, that is.) I gave away my TV.
I've thought about that...giving up the TV..but have not had the guts to do so. I too get tired of the sensationalism. I admit to getting sucked in, but am beginning to see the damage it does.
I've thought about canceling my cable and just keeping my TV for watching movies, but then I start to think "Well, what if there were some sort of disaster? I don't have a radio..." (Of course, I could just buy a radio.) Basically, I'm paying Comcast to let me watch NCIS and Bones when they're on.
A thoughtful essay, Jessalyn, and you are getting at one of the fundamental issues that is before us; What do we do when profit and the best interest of society might be at odds? This is true of both subjects of your essay - network news and healthcare - as well as education, social security, national defense, national infrastructure, energy, and many others. Most advanced nations deal with this this by either 'socializing' certain institutions (22 of 23 first world nations have some form of socialized medicine) or heavy regulation.
That said, I think the real question is, are we as a nation capable of getting past our hyper-competitiveness and libertarian roots to work for the common good? Can we even agree on what the common good is?
Thank you Tim, you pose two great questions. I think part of the problem in answering whether or not we can agree on what constitutes the common good is that, as a country with very little in the way of social welfare, we're used to non-profits picking up the slack, a concept that is totally foreign in any other developed country. But those organizations, effective as they can be, can't handle the problems of the entire middle class - they struggle to help the most impoverished among us enough to make a difference.
As a citizenry, we need to recognize that the American dream can't survive on the scale we expect of it without a government that can support its foundation. Our two options, once we've recognized that, are to downsize our expectations (something I don't think many Americans would be willing to do), or ask our government to step in and help out - then get out of the way to let them do so, and continue to remind them (loudly, at frequent intervals) what we need. I don't know what it will take to make that happen, but I'm hoping making some noise about it will help.
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