There's an old canard in defense of bad TV that says, "We are just giving the public what it wants." This sentiment has embarrassingly come back to bite TV news with the Donald Trump "run for the presidency" fiasco. Shouldn't there be some gating?
On the other hand we have the notoriously gated Fox News Network.
I personally think watching TV news harms the individual, but I don't have that much experience. Is it as bad as I think? Can or should anything be done?
4 comments:
nope, no. Without it where would John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Simpsons etc. get their jokes. But in seriousness, a social media doesn't harm the individual. Unless said individual hurts back attempting to throw tv out window after a really dumb pundit comment. Gating is for the most part bad, tends to do more harm than good. Individuals don't need to be babysat.
No babysitting! Thanks for bringing me back to my senses. What was I thinking? I guess any gating will be in the form of losing audience to the internet. The days of someone reading the news behind a desk are gone. Now you can read it yourself behind your own desk.
TV is just a flawed medium for news, but I guess there will always be an audience for news that moves, like fires, storms and animals…and celebrities.
Television news, of course, is an oxymoron, like military intelligence or Congressional courtesy.
The problem is that television news largely determines what issues people think about, how they think about them and what kinds of policy alternatives are considered viable. The unending barrage of crime stories on the news has everyone convinced that crime is a much more serious problem than it actually is, and that the only way to deal with crime is get-tough measures like three strikes. Also, the regular diet of violent and horrific crimes provided by TV news plays nicely into the hands of the NRA and the gun lobby: it's a dangerous world out there, arm yourself.
As any lawyer know, the reason a witness swears to tell "the whole truth" is that a part truth is a falsehood. By presenting such a myopic view of our communities, TV news presents a massive falsehood.
Internet suffers from the similar flaws and at times worse flaws. For instance, most of my pages bookmarked are left-leaning websites. Internet has allowed people to cut out the middle man but most people just want to reaffirm their beliefs(the middle man that can sometimes challenge views-yes I listen to Bill O'reilly). Hence the internet, not TV, lead to large growth in anti-vaccine movement, 9/11 truthers, anti-climate, antioxidants etc. I watch Fox, CNN, NBC, ABC, local news, read post-gazette, tribute from time to time so my news is not just macrumors, slate, popsci, sullivan, 538, times.com, facebook, etc.
Internet/tv/radio/newspaper news plays nicely in the hands of anyone, not just NRA. Heck, the internet has far more violence than TV, want to watch a terrorist chop through the neck of a prisoner I'll send you the link.
In the end, the individual processing the information must pick and choose what to be critical of. TV is no more or less harmful than any other new outlet (this feels like the campaign New York launched on Trans-fat harmfulness-thanks for determining what I can and can not put in my body). Every news source is flawed in some manner, I attempt to get as much information from as many different sources to help synthesize my views. Also, other times I am super lazy and take such articles as, "7 Boyfriend Body Language Signs Telling You He is Gay" as truth, thank you yahoo.
Post a Comment