The Problem with the News
As a journalist for many years (full-time for more than two decades), I’ve acquired a compulsive addiction to TV and radio news bulletins. If I’m driving a car and the time approaches the “top of the hour,” I’m quite unable to resist tuning the radio to the local full-time news network. If I’m watching TV (a fairly rare event), no matter what the program is that I might have intended to view, within a few minutes I find myself switching to CNN, or FOX, or MSNBC.
It was thus with utter dismay that I watched, on one of the news channels (for propriety’s sake I won’t say which), on a single middle-of-the-evening news bulletin quite recently, the following items: (1) a woman who thought she was a vampire had tied a man up, slashed him with a knife, and drunk his blood (presumably, he thought she had other things in mind when he submitted to being tied up); (2) a mother in a private home was barely prevented from drowning all of her children; (3) an 84-year-old woman was jailed for three years for having sex with an 11-year-old in her foster care.
The cliché response to these horrors is “What is the world coming to?” But a more thoughtful question is twofold: Is our totally free society becoming even more unglued today than it was in the past? Who is creating the demand for news of this particularly lurid variety—the TV consumer or the producer who thinks this will increase a news show’s ratings?
In answer to the first question, the jury is probably still out. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and Europe witnessed grisly crimes that have scarcely been equaled in our own day: Lizzy Borden was the notorious Massachusetts spinster accused (but later acquitted) of having murdered her parents with an axe in 1892. Four years earlier, Jack the Ripper had terrified the East End of London with fastidiously creative murders-by-disembowelment of London prostitutes. In the twentieth century, the US, the UK, and the rest of Europe had enough grisly murders to fill several months of continuous news bulletins. In 1966, Richard Speck alone murdered eight Filipina nurses in Chicago, stabbing or strangling them one by one. It’s probable that human wickedness has not, collectively, gotten any worse in recent decades.
Two things, however, have significantly changed our perception of these events. One is the news cycle, the momentum of non-stop around-the-clock news reporting that seems compelled to punctuate “serious news”—diplomacy, wars, politics—with sidebars that titillate people’s apparent need for gossipy items. The other is the shrinking capacity of most people’s attention spans. Rapid-image advertisements, video games, and music videos have all contributed to a reduction of most people’s capacity to absorb new information in measured, sustained doses. We seem to need attention-grabbing incidents and videos to keep ourselves awake.
Well, our attention has been grabbed. Unfortunately, we are reeling from it. A picture of humanity that is relentlessly colored by its most gruesome crimes is as unrealistic as one that ignores such crimes altogether. TV producers, of course, are not paid for their ability to balances images of evil with those of good deeds. But if enough viewers complained that constant depiction of mayhem in society was making them—well, ill—perhaps the corporate bean-counters who define what is profitable to air, and what is not, would give the producers new instructions.
I’m hopeful of this happening; on the other hand, I’m not holding my breath until it does.
Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is www.davidaikman.com.
5 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Society, Science and Technology, David Aikman, Wed 21 Feb 2007
