I don’t watch the news. I hate the news.
There is never anything on the news that I want to know. There is never anything on the news that I want to hear about. There isn’t anything important on, and anything that I would possibly ever care about, I can get on the Internet when I feel like it and probably much quicker.
But that’s really why I don’t watch the news. I hate the news for many other reasons. One of the main reasons is the fact that news media, in general, has deviated from its original intent, that being to act as a lens through which to see what our government is doing. Its original intent was to educate the general public. Its original intent was to spread information that the average citizen would not normally have access to. I love that idea!
Unfortunately, that’s not what most of our news media is there for these days. These days, news media is in it for themselves. Most are owned by large corporations, and are in a competitive market to earn profit. Instead of using the incredible power to do good, to criticize, to scrutinize, to expose, to educate, or to investigate, the news media tries to garner as many viewers as they can to bump their ratings, and to continue to earn revenue through their sponsors’ advertising.
The major problem here is that winning over the televisions of viewers is usually done by playing the ‘bad’ news. The fire. The war. The latest health scare. Whatever has happened that has a negative connotation is usually considered exciting. Unfortunately, exciting and actually important rarely intersect.
How does this make the media the real terrorists? Well, for one, they love to sensationalize chance. Is there a one in a hundred chance that you may be at risk (listen to these vague statements) for some sort of issue? Well you had better hurry up and take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen to you! Let’s check out the whole tomato/salmonella thing from about a month ago. No body eat tomatoes! You are at risk! In fact, you can’t eat tomatoes, because no one wants to be caught selling them! No one wants to hurt their company image by there being a chance that someone gets sick at their restaurant. Wikipedia is telling me that 1257 cases were reported. HOLY SHIT! LET’S ALL PANIC! I DON’T WANT TO BE NUMBER 1258! It’s funny how the Wikipedia article doesn’t mention any deaths…
Well, the real complaint isn’t that the media uses it’s own stories to scare the public, but the fact that the government uses the media as a tool by which to control. A particular scene in Zeitgeist comes to mind where they show various politicians repeating words such as “terror”, “terrorist”, “9/11″, etc. It’s amazing, really, how much they use it as a tool to get their point across. They keep reminding us that we have to be afraid of something, but they don’t really offer anything to actually be afraid of.
- This is how scared you should be.
One of my favorite tools was the Homeland Security Advisory System. It was a great way for the government to tell us how scared we should be. Wikipedia tells me that “the threat level has never been lowered on a nationwide basis to Guarded (Blue) or Low (Green)” We have been, since the implementation of this system, at a “significant risk of terrorist attacks”. Notice that it is a significant for multiple attacks. Again, I turn to Wikipedia to tell us that there really haven’t been many attacks in the US. Look at the other countries, and how much worse they have it.
In fact, going from that track record, I would say that we were at low risk of having a terrorist atack. Or maybe even at a general risk of terrorist attack. Notice how the chart is completely pessimistic, however. It leave out the possiblility of no chance for an attack. We are always at some sort of risk. This time, we have the government sensationalizing the low chance of something happening. Maybe it’s the reason people play the lottery; they know that it’s possible that they can win, so they really think they can win. Even though they know that the chances are low, they still believe that it can happen. And it can! It’s just not going to happen to you. And you aren’t going to be the target of a terrorist attack, either. Just stop spening you money on lottery tickets, and stop letting the government scare you into thinking that you are at risk.
