Dakota Beacon

How many people criticize the legacy media and their news coverage for distortion, misinformation, omission, or outright lying? Better still, why do we continue to ingest this stuff?

These are good reasons to unplug the television. The dominant media no longer presents “news you can use” expecting the public to reason through the “facts” and draw their own conclusions. The media in general has become another form of entertainment, a business venture, advocating one line of thought. By extension, “media” now includes all varieties of electronic media, social media in all its forms, blogs, and news apps. True journalism is dead.

The following resurrected piece is republished from The Passing Scene by popular demand. Several readers commented in the past and a few have asked for reprints. Here goes.

Enter the classic media critique by sociologist, teacher, and author Neil Postman (1931-2003) and his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” (1985). He argues that electronic media as a medium expressing ideas through alluring visual imagery reduces politics, news, history, education, and Christianity to merely entertainment. Inevitably, this leads to the trivialization of public discourse.

If you unplug all media, you benefit by no longer being irritated by obnoxious badgering through “news” marketing and propaganda. Important skills laid out in serious literature, such as inductive and deductive reasoning, argumentation, and rhetoric may yet be recovered. And who could not use such skills to make sense of a world in chaos?

Electronic media no longer reflects culture. It shapes it. For countless Americans, seeing, not reading, becomes the basis for believing. The world portrayed through electronic media seems real and natural and not bizarre.

Television’s effect on our culture took place gradually at first and then reached critical mass. We woke up one day and found our ability to think clearly and to reason had been drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Or, as Postman says, “Television has become…the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe, the all-but-imperceptible electronic big bang of a century past, so familiar and so thoroughly integrated with American culture...”

We use language to challenge, dispute, and cross-examine. The printed word, not the image, accomplishes this. TV pictures do not establish propositions. Meaningful words like “true” and “false” come from the universe of language and not an electronic image. At best, we can passively receive an image which has no context or syntax. Then what? First come violent demonstrations followed by cures for erectile dysfunction; then images of forest fires somewhere followed a moment later by a pitch for feminine hygiene products succeeded by the conflagration of war somewhere in the world. Finally, a talking gecko reassures us we need his insurance. In a word, this becomes – what? Mindless entertainment, diversion, dissipation, recreation, gratification, enjoyment, pleasure? Electronic media produces a stream of images without context explaining nothing yet offering fascination in place of coherence. People are provided with entertainment to keep them pacified and swayed. Enough already!

Electronic media impacts various aspects of culture including education, economics, politics, and religion. Politics as the hot topic of the day tops the list of examples and the electronic media has devastated political discourse. To be rationally considered, any claim must be made in language, specifically as a proposition. This is how truth and falsehood are derived. If this realm of discourse is discarded, then any possible logical analysis goes out the window. Linguistic discourse becomes obsolete. Shouting matches ensue. Truth or falsity of a claim become a non-issue. The emotional appeal through image, music, and drama negates the need for reason. It’s all about feelings. In the end, legitimate political discourse becomes impossible.

Postman sets the tone of his book early on by comparing two different visionaries. George Orwell in “1984” and Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” did not prophesy the same thing. In “1984” Orwell feared those who would ban books. In “Brave New World” Huxley saw no reason to ban books. People would not want to read them. In “1984” people were controlled by inflicting pain. In “Brave New World” people were controlled by inflicting pleasure. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley believed truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Postman concludes his book siding with Huxley. “…what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

Postman’s book is well worth the read for grasping the drift of today’s American culture.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).