Only Three News Stories
November 27th, 2007
The electronic media is a wonderful invention. The forty year old vision of Marshall McLuhan of a global village where the electronic media connects us all and becomes an extension of our brains is now truly a reality. The power to educate, connect and inspire are all inherently available on radio, television and the internet. That is why the television news coverage of this past Thanksgiving week was so incredibly disappointing.
There seemed to be only three news stories. Whether I watched the network new programs, the cable news networks or the local news the stories were the same.
News story number one: Airline travel over the Thanksgiving holiday. The anchor throws to one or more reporters live at the check in areas of major airports who breathlessly talks about how busy it might be, what the weather might do to flight schedules and what delays to expect. All of this reported within the context of the recent unfriendly skies of commercial aviation. This of course is accompanied by interviews with a few travelers and what they expected or had experienced. It seemed like the only people traveling were mothers with young children. Every single story had a mom with a young child in arms talking about going to grandma’s house.
News story number two: The unusually high price of gas for November. Segueing with, ‘for those that aren’t flying there is the problem of record gasoline prices’. This usually is followed by an interview with a motorist at a gas pump or someone from the AAA or some other travel related group talking about how high the price of gas is and the possible effect on holiday driving.
News story number three: The visuals of screaming people seemingly on sugar highs running through the entrance to a discount store in the pre-dawn darkness worshiping at the alter of bargain prices. There was not a single newscast I saw that didn’t discuss black Friday and black cyber Monday. Is this the society I live in? Ugh. The use of the word black relates to profit as in “being in the blackâ€. The double entendre this year is that the consumers might give retailers a black depression. For me the word is apropos as it reflects on what we call civilization. The middle ages were called the Dark Ages and the scourge of the time was the Black Plague.
Sorry to be a bit of a curmudgeon here, but when every single news outlet has these same three stories, all saying the same thing and for six days it points to the dumbness of the media. Newspapers were not much better as all front pages had pictures and stories about at least two of these stories if not all three. When media executives wring their hands and wonder where their audiences and readers have gone, they should be made to watch or read all this dull sameness over and over again.
Why does this bother me other than the repetitive dumbness of all these stories? Well, first we all know the outcomes of all three stories. All the travelers more or less made it to their destinations and got home. All the drivers filled up their tanks, groaned a bit and drove anyway. And for the next two weeks the talking heads on television will speculate about how whether this will be a good season for retailers and what that might mean about the consumer driven economy. So, a lot of reporting on three stories where the outcomes are more or less predictable. As a society we manage to create drama around our social process much as many people manufacture drama around their own lives. We all get caught up in the process of living so much that we think it is newsworthy.
This leads me to the second reason I get frustrated with this type of reporting. There are so many interesting developments in the world and there are so many huge issues facing humanity that to have the incredible power of the mainstream media sleep walk through formulaic reporting is sad. While I try to live in the present as much as possible, as a futurist I spend a lot of timing thinking about the future. The patterns and trends I see that give me a glimpse on the future make me want to shake the media by the shoulders and tell them to lead the way. Use your power to prepare and lead.
Marshall McLuhan infused many of us with a vision of an electronically connected global village that opens up opportunities of unparalleled connectedness that can lead to a new dawn. He also said something that, unfortunately, is reflected in the current state of news media and society today: “Most of the people drive down the highway of life looking in the rear view mirrorâ€.
November 27th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Exactly right, David. Let’s do even better and write the news headlines for Christmas Eve and Morning right now: (1) Christmas shopping season slow, but a last-minute consumer rush brings the merchandisers back into the black (cue appropriate visuals that could be lifted from any of the last twenty years’ file footage). (2) NORAD detects progress of mysterious sleigh originating from the North Pole (cue stupid spectacle of news anchors wearing appropriate Santa hats). (3) Whole family wiped out by tragic fire caused by faulty space heater or furnace (omit explanation of why this always happens in poor neighborhoods).
I could continue, but gotta hit the mall before the rush.
— David Finkel
November 27th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
in a dumbed-down country, the majority will always be wrong… a t-shirt idea i never made…
but, my gosh, did you just get hip to this? crikey, been going on for years….
and given that this is how it is, how are you going to live?
even more, what are you doing watching television anyway? anybody with a brain doesn’t even own one…
gosh… what can i say… i encourage your to get beyond this and think in a more creative way…
and read up on brainwashing….
November 27th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
More profound and distinctly not self-evident!
Let’s get on with our work of determining the
future. The first step is to identify and define the
problem clearly. You have done that very effectively,
November 28th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
your post has stayed in my mind for a few days, and i have been using it to work through some concepts in my mind…
i was surprised to find such a retro understanding about television news from someone who seems to have been connected with the industry, and the seeming incongruency of this his led me to an understanding, almost daoist in its stated form…. everything is really its opposite…
this may sound odd, i dont mean it to, an illustration would be that “insiders” in any field are the last to know about the effect they have in the world outside of their speciality… the current administration of the us government is a clear example, they haven’t a clue about the reality their actions are creating; only an outsider can see that…
your post is another example, only an outsider can see the effects of what insiders are doing…
so, the conclusion…. what we are experts at is precisely where our blind spots are.
and the implications are, ha, … take iot from here…
November 28th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
So what does “Black Friday” mean then? Whenever I’d heard it in the past I assumed it was something like the UK’s Black Monday, which was a particular date (don’t know which but it had some anniversary quite recently) when there as a financial crash…
November 28th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
gregory – stupid pandering to the lowest common denominator audience has always been the function of popular media. I knew it when I was in the belly of the beast. I was just making the point that we are at one of the most critical junctures in the history of our country and the media continues to let us down.
John – The black refers to profit, as in being in the black as opposed to being in the red. In other words, retailers basically start to make their profit for the year the day after Thanksgiving. That means that is the Christmas shopping season is a bust, the year is a bust. If it is not a bust this year, then the first quarter sales in 2008 will be a disaster.
David Houle
November 28th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
thanks for the reply…
i am wondering what to do about all of this. i think powerlessness is one of the things people feel in a mediated environment…. no way to change the behavior of governments or corporations; heck, it is hard enough even to contact them…
violent social uprisings were effective in earlier century, but the days of kings losing their heads at charing cross are probably done with….
what i have come up with, just ignore the status quo, live my life from the values i think are important, and anyway, the most interesting people i met an america last summer were ones who know that the “shift” has already happened, so ignoring the stories coming from the media was considered natural
will follow your work here for awhile… keep cooking
November 29th, 2007 at 8:56 am
I think that approach is fine. The Eastern belief that one changes the world by changing oneself. The shift is happening. I try to live with my values but the highest value I have to this off kilter society is to speak and write about the future and the possibilities we have ahead. Most people don’t think about the future, I try to be the catalyst to get them to do so.
Thank you gregory for being a reader.
David
December 1st, 2007 at 2:55 am
i will take this an opportunity to structure some thoughts, put them into words….
the future is not an object. it is a concept, held in the present moment. esoterically the future is the out-picturing of assumptions about life held in this moment now.
the only way to directly affect “the future” is to change our understanding of what we think a human being is, or of what life is.
the future is a concept defining our now.
lecturing on the future must involve providing a picture of larger possibilities, a better way to live, think, be…. it is talking about the (new word) transpossible, into the area beyond the idea of what is possible…
this presupposes a concept of evolution or change or developement, and those ideas are not shared by all cultures or all individuals… agrarian or tradtional cultures, for example, necessarily must resist change…
one of the best metaphors i have encountered lately that explains the ideas behind how and why people or cultures are different is the concept of spiral dynamics, currently being popularized by don beck or ken wilbur….
in essence, this is a metaphor for growth in the breadth of consciousness, or from another point of view, spiritual evolution, from physical to metaphysical, possible to metapossible… (bunch of new words here today)
i think about this stuff because i see life as a growth of consciousness, i have a model of personal evolution… not all people do…
ok, enough… would like to hear one of your talks..
gregory
December 1st, 2007 at 10:42 am
Gregory-
Well said. If you can read Ken Wilbur and hold it all clearly in your mind you are ahead of most of the planet. A true visionary and mega thinker. Funny you write about consciousness. The book I have coming out early next year called “The Shift Age” is about the age we are in. As said in that book : “Tools defined the agricultural age, machines defined the industrial age, technology has defined the information age and consciousness will define the Shift Age.” We think alike.
David
December 1st, 2007 at 1:26 pm
ah, very nice sequence… seeing the self as separate from the story is one understanding that might pertain to the “shift age”…. maybe, that is what does the shifting, and what we are really interested in is the post-shift age… your next next book
i was about to talk about power, and how what seem to be the powerful agencies in the world are not; are, with only a slight shift in viewpoint, actually advertising their powerlessness… but i won’t
keep it coming