As I was watching the news, I discovered that entertainment's focus is to engage the audience and to give them the feeling that they are being informed, just as Postman predicted. One show, however, caught my attention more than any of the others. Nancy Grace is a television show in which a bigoted woman devotes her time to issues that she believes "the public deserves to hear the truth about." Now, as this is a common slogan to any television news network, you would expect to hear world issues, right? Wrong. Not only does she report exclusively on the murder of young people, but she builds a foundation for her stories by covering them for months at a time. Flip to her show, and there it is: new evidence about where the body may be found, pleas from the family of the victim, and trials that are being taken to find the killer. So, Ms. Grace, how is this relevant to anything? We "demand to know the truth" of what, the brutal murder that you have so happily presented before us? This is a case closed, and I can make no action whatsoever to change that. However, the show always brings a disturbing amount of emotions to the viewer.
Through this, has Postman failed to predict that the discourse of news itself will no longer have to do with irrelevant information, but rather provoking an emotion? More and more television shows have stopped reporting information all together, and instead they act as a soap opera, with a cast that changes week to week as in Nancy Grace, to entertain the viewers. Is this beneficial, that the separation of information and media has become more evident? Or is this, in contrast, a deeper threat to society, that the media will report for the sake of evoking pure emotion? I believe that a society ran by the communications of emotion is highly more dangerous than one that is ran on the communications of irrelevant information, because what we cannot do with irrelevant information, we can put into effect through emotion.
What do you think?
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i believe that television is always looking for ways to unlock our subconcious and plant the necessary seed there so that one way or another, we fall in love with television. Nowadays we believe there is many different types of programs, but they all come from the same medium. if tv knows how to control our emotions, we're hooked for life. I don't think any tv is beneficial, Warren, I just think its junk, no matter how it is presented.
ReplyDeleteNancy Grace -- ick. Sometimes if I'm at the gym and I see her show on the tv monitors that are everywhere in front of me, I'll move, or look down at my feet. Some TV is not merely stupid -- some TV is actively bad. It doesn't ADD anything to our lives, but in fact sucks something out of us. A steady diet of that junk and all that's left is an empty dried up husk.
ReplyDeleteAt some point, we have to decide if we're going to lead our lives with open arms and a passionate heart, or if we're going to lead with fists and fear. Bad things happen to all of us at some point. Do we let the bad things make us more open and more compassionate, or do we let the bad things make us hard and distrustful? Nancy Grace panders to our fears and our cynicism. What an ironic name, "Grace."