Day 12 - No TV News = Good News
Here's this from William Rivers Pitt, a high school teacher turned journalist/activist who runs truthout.org:
…media does not report the news anymore. They create consensus, they manufacture the common fictions under which we are expected to live. With the TV media, this behavior is all the more insidious because TV reaches everyone. Television is the most extraordinarily effective tool of mass control that has ever been invented by anyone anywhere…After almost 2 weeks with no TV news, my perception of world events is less anchored in fixed visual imagery and centered more around what my imagination arrives at after soaking up other forms of media. Sometimes TV news feeds me rare & valuable in-depth glimpses of what's actually happening, from angles that provoke thought. In that sense I'm poorer for missing those moments. But it seems as if my mind is working to compensate for that loss, and is slowly coming up with a more agile form of cognition to supplement & enliven the radio/print I take in. I know very little about neurology, but I imagine if I were hooked up to a CAT Scan it would show that new neural pathways are being opened up in my brain, and that can only be good.
During a book tour I did a couple of years ago, I went to a whole bunch of red states: Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Orange County California (yes, that counts as a red state), North Carolina and the recently blueified New Hampshire. I would talk like this about the TV news media, and then I would ask the people in the crowd if any of them owned guns. These were red states, so a fair number of hands went up. Good, I said. Excellent. Go home and shoot your television. They laughed, but I was totally serious.
posted by DeLange @ 1:19 PM
1 Comments:
I stopped watching television sometime during the Gulf War (i.e. the liberation of Kuwait). This pretty much means that I was completely out of that loop throughout the nineties. Despite that, it is such a pervasive medium in our lives, always in the periphery of our senses, always within ear and eyeshot as we wait in waiting rooms, in airports, bars, wherever, that I could list probably the names of the main characters in some of the shows as though I had watched them. It's weird.
A word of warning:
People will not readily believe that you don't watch television for some reason. I have been called a liar for saying it.
people are strange
I wish you strength and clarity
peace
ó
Post a Comment
<< Home