The following was published in the Birmingham Post-Herald on 7/9/03 (note: it was not online, and I am not sure at this point what the published title was, nor if any editig was done):
Steven L. Taylor, Ph.D.
In World War II the public received news via radio, newspapers, magazines, and newsreels at the movies. None of these conveyed information in a way that we in 2024 would recognize as truly “new” news, at least in the sense that could often be days old. And even the most recent information was hardly immediate. And certainly the only moving images seen by the public were sanitized and limited in scope.
In Gulf War II there was live footage of troops and bombings, with reporters embedded directly with the forces engaged in the attacks. And all of this was taking place live, often unedited before our eyes, on twenty-four/seven cable and broadcast television. Further, we now have the internet. There are news sites and weblogs that are constantly being updated with information, not hot off the presses, but hot off the battlefield.
America floats on a sea of information. Twenty-four hours cable news channels epitomize American impatience and interest in information: we want to know, and we want to know now. This has an upside and a downside.
The upside is clear: information is a good thing, although, as we saw in the recent war, immediate information is not always correct information. Still, it beats the alternative.
The first time in my life that is was acutely clear to me that I was used to constant information was in 1995 when I stood in the middle of my apartment in Bogota, Colombia, and felt the building moving around me. Having lived six years in southern California, I was familiar with the sensation. Once the building stopped moving, I did what I always do when some major event occurs: I turned on the television. In California an earthquake would result in immediate press coverage. One would be sure that the local news would soon have live footage of the broken pickle jars strewn on the floor of the nearest supermarket. When I flicked the TV on in Colombia, however, all I could find on the three stations were soap operas. I eventually found some news on the radio. There is a huge upside to immediate information, and when one doesn’t have it, one notices.
There is, however, a clear downside to the unrelenting information flow that permeates American life: if there is going to be twenty-hour/seven day a week coverage, that means that they have to keep talking, and talk about something, even if there really isn’t much to talk about. When important and ongoing events take place, we can find out about their status as they are happening. This is a good thing. If there is an earthquake, hurricane, war, or political crisis, the news networks are there for us. However, when there isn't an ongoing story, they want us to be there for them, so the need to fill their broadcasts with the urgent and the dramatic takes over and we get endless summers of over-hyped news. For example: as soon as Gulf War II wound down, it was Attack of SARS! and then it was the drama of the Scott Peterson murder trail. Nothing new of significance today? Not to fear, we will just breathlessly recount the SARS deaths in China, a number far lower than traffic deaths in LA County that day, but a whole lot more exotic and interesting!
There are two problems here: first, the drive for the dramatic detracts from actual news. For example, there is still quite a bit going on in Afghanistan, yet we hear very little about it. The second problem is the hyped nature of the news. This both distorts the given story (such as the summer-fest of kidnapping and shark attacks in recent years (neither shark attacks nor kidnappings were actually up, but we sure felt like they were) and makes us take news coverage in general less seriously.
Of course, this summer has its own excellent examples of this type of story, such as the recent monkeypox scare. Between lulls in the Peterson trial we were regaled with tales of giant Gambian rats, exotic prairie dogs, and a "smallpox-like" disease. What more could a cable TV network want? And when monkeypox waned, there was always the windshield murder, and now the Baylor basketball player mystery. And even when there is no new information, the stories are nonethelss reported upon. The more dramatic, the better.
Of course, all this puts us on guard, or at least it should. First, we have to realize that when the media trots out these tales of impending doom, that we must take them with a grain of salt (if not the whole shaker). Hype does not equal truth. And hype can create significant distortions in the public mind. For example: for years we were all convinced that crime was on the rise, and that we were getting less safe every year. In fact, the crime rate was on the decline, but we all thought it was on the rise. Why? Because that was all that we saw on the television news night after night.
If the cable media giants get really lucky perhaps someone will kidnap a kid infected with monkeypox, and the kidnapper will then be attacked by a shark on the way to visit Scott Peterson in jail. It would be a newsapalooza--the cable news industry's midsummer’s around the clock cable channel’s dream.
Posted by Steven at July 11, 2024 02:31 PM | TrackBack