Joe Carter has an excellent, genuine must read article about how the News makes us dumb. The basic thesis is that the News, as an entity, serves us up bits of information presented in a breathless format designed, really, for no other purpose than to garner our attention – with, of course, the pay off for the news industry being the chance to show us some advertising.
If you actually pay attention to the daily news you’ll obtain a false picture of what is going on in the world – you’re sense of values will be skewed and you won’t be able to arrive at rational conclusions…you’re never given a chance to think about things because before you can ponder what just happened and try to fit it in to a larger picture, the next news story comes along to grab your attention.
G. K. Chesterton, long ago, noted that journalism is the art of informing people that Lord Jones is dead when they never knew that Lord Jones was ever alive. In other words, you only get a part of the story – and usually the most useless part. Its not that there is a deliberate attempt to lie (though there is, at times, just that) but that the News is incapable of telling the truth in the sense of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Whether its a three minute television report or several paragraphs in the paper or on line, a news story cannot give you the full context of the event – and unless you bestir yourself to fill in the gaps (which requires not just reading what happened today, but having a large fund of knowledge of everything which has transpired through history) then you are not going to be able to know what is really going on.
This is not to say there is nothing useful in the News – for a well-informed person, today’s story might provide the last clue to decipher a whole series of events going back for a long time and illuminating what may happen in the future. But the key is “well-informed”; some people simply lack the time and inclination to become well-informed. This portion of the population varies over time – some times larger, some times smaller. Right now, people are paying closer attention because things are so clearly screwed up – and, of course, there are more sources of News than there used to be and the law of averages dictates that more of the full truth will get through.
But do keep in mind that in the battle against ignorance, the News is not necessarily an ally. Someone who is fully informed of the days events as presented by the News business can often be more ignorant than the guy who sat quietly through the day and thought about things.
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